This week: September tomatoes, ghost pixels, locoweed, rejection season, an ode to the multiple orgasm, and much more. Enjoy.

Suddenly the humidity rolls away and the temperatures drop and, with shorter days, the tomatoes stop ripening. Some of them start to rot on the vine; it’s time to start pulling up vines and cutting down sunflower and corn stalks. The meadow continues being gold with solidago, but robins start flocking in the lawn and there are no more fireflies, cicadas, or catbirds. Karina Borowicz’s poem “September Tomatoes” captures the feeling perfectly: “The whiskey stink of rot has settled/in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises/when I touch the dying tomato plants.”

I’m happy to note that three (yes! Three!) of my poems, all of them fairly new, appear in Issue #74 of Canary A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. While it’s unsettling that we’ve come to a time when poems about how we’re finding ourselves in environment crisis seem necessary, I’m grateful to Gail Entrekin for editing Canary for many years. And glad to have my poems in its virtual pages. Poet/writer Lynn Levin, whose work I’ve long admired, told me about Canary; I enjoy reading each issue, and the back issues as well. It’s nice that Entrekin keeps the archives of previous issues accessible to readers.

Which brings me to what I’ve been reading lately, because I continue to re-read from my poetry library. This week, it’s Adam Zagajewski. But I should mention that I read poetry online pretty much every day, usually on my laptop because the cell phone is just too small and often screws up line breaks. (We poets spend enough time considering line breaks that tech formatting should never decide lineation for us!) Reading online poetry journals lets me keep up with contemporary poetry and learn about poets I might have otherwise missed–such as Borowicz. I found “September Tomatoes” online when looking up something else.

Ann E. Michael, Poetry online

When fall ends
my neighbors trim their gardens

down to nothing,
mulch and soil.

But I like my unruly garden,
refuge for tiny native bees

and the rabbits
under the bush.

Once the bears take a nap
I’ll feed the birds.

For now the name of God
we’re drawing down

is drying stalks
and first frost.

Rachel Barenblat, New name

Is it too early in the season for autumnal lament? Well, yes. But the furnace is kicking on now some mornings, and I’ve started to pull out the cold-weather clothing, and I’ve had thoughts about draining the hoses and closing the combination windows. One becomes conscious of things, of their relationship to to time and change, and of the sense that certain things are passing out of our lives. All this has a way of dredging up elegiac poems, like this one.

The Vanished

In the autumn of 2015, the production of paper cards for library catalogs ceased.

No matter how long ago they completed their disappearance,
I still expect them,
perhaps in a sort of narthex just past a pillared entry,
or off to the side
as if in a private chapel, or straight ahead like an altar.
Shrined in the silence,
modest and single, or ranged in ranks and banks and rows,
the gods of Order
lived in their tabernacles of honey and amber maple
or oak like chocolate,
darkened at times from the touch of a hundred thousand fingers. […]

Maryann Corbett, Of Objects and Elegy

These anniversaries are tricky: the push of the past on the tenderness of the present, coupled with the uncertainty of the future, can make it scary to keep going. I do wish I still had my husband’s wisdom and strength to fall back on, but I’ve grown more self-reliant and self-directed in these years without him. I think he’d be proud of me. People tell me he is, but there’s no way to know for sure. I can only live the life I think he’d cheer on, because he was always my biggest advocate and my greatest fan. I was also his biggest fan, reminding him to send out his poems, hyping up his books, announcing his publications proudly on social media.

In the end, despite all the pain of loss, I’m so glad for those decades spent together. These anniversaries can be tricky, but as each passes, I have to acknowledge that once upon a time, a man from Little Rock met a a newly graduated college girl from the Bronx, and that duo became inseparable until death did actually part us. I acknowledge that just as much as I acknowledge the loss itself. I move on, with gratitude and grief in equal measures.

Allison Joseph, Anniversary Season

now I lay me down
in a quiet wood
in the mossy
ripe-smelling
undergrowth

now I lay my head upon the leaves
still falling
still letting go
still greening before the coming storm

I lay me down beneath
the canopy of leaves
beneath the great
soft swelling belly of the Earth

Rebecca Cook, now i lay me down

My husband brings me bones of things, sometimes with a bit of skin, part of an eye. He brings me animals, both living and dead: a baby squirrel, a tiny snake, a bird skull tinier than the pad of your thumb, a mouse bone. He points out the birds nesting on his window ledge, the grasshopper stuck to your screen, the cool moth on the brick wall.

I know I’m in for a delight when I hear: Les, bring your camera. Hurry.

Wednesday, it was a baby snapping turtle! Marty discovered it on the road while walking Ziggy and brought it home in a dirty paper cup for me to see. He handled it carefully, set it on the blue table, held it again, then gently put it back into the cup and drove it to the river at Herring Run, leaving it at a prominent snapper mating spot.

After he released it, Marty took videos of the turtle getting accustomed to the water. He watched it swim against the current to get on a rock, miss, and try again. And off it swam.

In 2010, he returned with the dogs and a dead crow, frozen in the February snow, no blood, all intact. He knew I’d want to take its picture but had no idea what would happen after that. So it sat in a bag in a box on a table for several days, until I took it to a taxidermist. “Henry” has been hanging on my living room wall for 16 years. That crow inspired a short story, an essay, and a poem.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Creature Feature

My sister recently told me that our cousin, who has been reading along on this meta-journey of (not)writing about my mother, asked her if I was ever going to write another post…or anything connected to the project. On the one hand, it’s nice to know there are people (Brian! Thank you!) waiting for my writing to arrive. On the other…well, see previous post.

But! I do have something to offer in the interim: my third book of poems, Flor/elegy, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in February 2027, and is now available for pre-order through the distributor!

As is my way with these things, the poems included span many years of writing. Also familiar to readers of anything I’ve ever written will be the themes. Motherhood, daughterhood, love, loss and grief for both the human and the natural world. The title is meant to play on the poetic form of the elegy along with the Medieval florilegium, a collection of botanical illustrations […]

Florilegium can also refer to a gathering of literary texts. How about that! Very grateful to my editor at CMU Press for helping me find the title. It’s perfect.

Sheila Squillante, Can I Interest You in Some Poems Instead?

This week sees the publication of two books with swans in their title. One, a collection of poetry that will glide slowly, gracefully, hopefully off the press at Ink & Ribbon, the other that will, no doubt, fly from the shelves in astonishing numbers with translations planned in 12 languages.

Swan Song: Diana, My Sister by Charles Spencer, a portrait of the late Princess of Wales, has been described in The Guardian as, “a fascinating document that tells us a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer.” Around twenty major news outlets have so far given it coverage with international notices in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times as well as features in magazines like Vogue. In the UK The Daily Mail serialisation will tell you that the publicity engine behind this book is huge. ‘News’ items appear across the BBC where the author is afforded airtime to steer serious questions toward his book. […]

Both Swan books published this week are about belonging. Spencer’s to family, to aristocracy, to royalty and bloodline, to inheritance and celebrity. My Name Is Swan offers the opposite, a document of the outsider, the wayfarer, the fugitive, the marginalised figure moving, unwatched, unattached, dispossessed at the edge of the city.

Jan Noble, Nº83 A tale of two Swans

it rained all week at the beach.
what a gift to know so many forms
of water. we let the wind off the shore
make kites of us. our lungs in the clouds.
the sea gulls stood, beaks to gale,
cutting the wind into ribbons. we looked
far out where the waves argued
like old brothers.

Robin Gow, sea foam

It is almost a year since my friend, editor and publisher John Lucas died.
With John went his Shoestring Press, which was only right, given the hands on nature of his relationship with his writers, their work and with every aspect of his beloved Shoestring.

The book he was kindly going to publish for me, Light Work, was almost ready to go to print. I briefly considered approaching other publishers of poetry- waiting for submissions to open, entering competitions etc- but for various reasons, I decided to see if I might select some of the poems I liked most from the book for a pamphlet instead. I do love a pamphlet, and it also felt like a chance to re-evaluate what I had to offer, and to make something new.

After a productive month or so of drafting and redrafting – this tends to come in bursts in my case, with new poems putting me in a productive place to revisit older ones with fresh eyes – I had a good number of poems, older and newer, that seemed to work well together and that I was happy with, so I put these in a Word document and sent them off to New Walk Editions, publisher of very smart books and pamphlets.

Roy Marshall, New Pamphlet in 2027

Very happy to say I am honored to have an essay in Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, with some powerhouses like Diane Seuss, Brian Turner, Kimiko Hahn and some friends (who are also powerhouses) like Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oliver de la Paz, and Julie Marie Wade. I am looking forward to reading all the essays because the form is very interesting to me, and I like the idea that writing essays can follow the body or breath as form, that it can be experimental or traditional, that it does some things that poetry cannot do. My essay is called “When Poetry Gets Mutated: Writing Lyric Essays, Haibun, and Other Hybrids.” (Gotta represent the mutants!) Each essay also has a prompt, so it lends itself to teaching as well as just personal education. Check it out from Rose Metal Press! Also shout-out to the editors, Lee Horikashi Roripaugh and Heidi Czerwiec.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Adventures at the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Harvest Fairs, the Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, Harvest Moons and Looking Forward

I spent time recently along a portion of the iron curtain. All this time, I sort of thought that “iron curtain” was a metaphor, not a real thing. Not miles and miles of posts and barbed wire and watchtowers, and the band of no-man’s-land that ran alongside. It was chilling, to see among these benign rolling hills and fields of gourds and sunflowers, oak forests and locust stands, signs of those perilous times of desperation and cruelty. Of death and iron. Small villages dot the landscape, and old castles. The language is blurry with soft g’s and zh’s. The soup is delicious. The coffee is strong. The people impassive of face. At first. There is laughter not far below the stony surface. There are stories. And ghosts. And in the shadows, shapeless masses of unfinished things. Which is the definition of “golem.” I came back more afraid of the future now that I’ve tasted more of the past. Something of strangeness and the past and the future is captured in this poem by C.D. Wright, whose work often leaves me perplexed but moved, sometimes, as poetry can reach beyond the rational brain to the shadows within.

Marilyn McCabe, Against the cold spurs in the sky

Your stars wrapped me so tightly
I stayed.
Acquiescence was deeply blue,
striving for sunlight.

What is the texture
of the process, where is the binding cord?

Flight is the capacity of a place inside
us to forge a path. Cup your hands
and they fill with wildness.
Nurture it.
Deliver it.
Let the stars go.

Charlotte Hamrick, War: A Tryptic

It’s one of those weeks. I’ve reached an awkward point in putting together what will, hopefully, be my first full poetry collection, and I’ve got myself all tangled up with it. You know when you decide to clear out a cupboard and it has to get much, much worse before it gets better? Like that. I’ve no idea whether the jam jars should live with the bags for life, or where the seventeen single gloves came from. I’ve lost sight of the individual poems and what I want them to do. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, well, I can’t see the trees for the wood at the moment.

Luckily, I have some lifelines: the mantra your only job is to write one poem (courtesy of Jo Bell), the Arvon course I’m going on soon which I’m hoping will press the reset button, and, as always, poetry collections that make me think yep, that’s how you do it. This week, the hand of fate has given me Significant Other, Isabel Galleymore’s first collection, published by Carcanet in 2019. Thank goodness it has. I needed to be reminded to sweat the small stuff – to mix my metaphors even further, I needed to be reminded that if you take care of the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves.

This is a book full of small, careful poems, poems about sea creatures and other creatures and people creatures. Writing short poems well takes fierce focus and a bomb-disposal expert level of precision to make it look like you’ve got to the heart of something easily and without wasting a word. It takes confidence. It is far from easy. […]

The reason I’m so glad I’m reading Significant Other again this week, I think, is that this collection shows very clearly that if you pay attention to each tiny thing you’re doing, the book will sound like you and say the things you want to say anyway. Each poem here is a tiny glow made of finely-tuned language – a robin, a starfish, a seahorse, a scrotum frog. And the poems don’t all sound the same, or look the same, but the book as a whole becomes an ecosystem, almost a manifesto, that tells us about life on Earth. Maybe I can stop agonising about how tidy the cupboard is. Match up the gloves. Look after the pennies. Separate the wood from the trees. One poem at a time.

Nia Broomhall, Week 28: Significant Other

During the dog days of summer, I went with a friend to visit the bookshop at a local spiritual retreat center. Since we didn’t plan ahead at all, the bookshop ended up being closed when we arrived. Fortunately, an exhibit was on view. We were told, sotto voce, that we must be exceptionally quiet (!), as the overnight guests were enjoying a silent retreat.

I’ve been to several exhibits at this venue before, but never during quiet hours, and the silence added to the experience. As I live on the east coast, we battle humidity more than aridity. Two thousand miles away, the New Mexico landscape in these photographs might as well have been the moon. Compelling, bleak, and deeply transformative. […]

In the early 18th century, Miguel de Quintana, a devoutly religious Spanish poet living in a settlement about fifty miles from Pecos Pueblo, penned verses against the Inquisition, and for this, he was denounced as a heretic by the Catholic Church. His work was translated by Francisco Lomeli and Clark A. Colahan in Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico: Miguel de Quintana’s Life and Writings. One of the few lone voices in the (colonial) wilderness of New Mexico who wrote openly against the Church, these lines are from his poem, ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’:

Gain that understanding
That the power of God has given you.
Perfect it, Miguel, and write,
For you have in no way strayed.

God’s strength moves you,
And there is no power
That can resist it…

Miguel, save and enlighten me,
For I burn on the coals
Of this sea of tears
Which I show to you weeping.

Fear not, for you are on the right path…

Today, there are institutions we must challenge, and empires against which we must rise. Although de Quintana’s poetry was not part of the exhibit, it could have been. That I came away feeling so moved by the people, places, and cultures of New Mexico speaks to the skill of the photographer, Bill Graustein, in creating a visual narrative, along with the artist, Magalis Videaux, with whom he collaborated. It is also a testament to the places and people themselves.

Jenevieve Carlin, Silent Hours

The poem’s speaker, from the first line, steels herself, as it seems, to confront a certain, and certainly awful, doom. Her composure in the face of a merciless God is a central fact of the poem. Strangely, it is by way of this very composure and resolution that the soul outwits the divine judge and slips free of the noose. First, although condemned as a “him” at the end of stanza 2, by the second line of the following stanza the soul has shape-shifted, rather like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and become female. Through this pronominal sleight of hand, remaking reality by an act of free will, the soul alters the terms by which the sentence has been pronounced.

Second, and more significantly, under these altered terms the speaker has “made my soul familiar” with the prospect of death. It’s as though, on leaving the courtroom, she sits down with the hangman to discuss the final plan, persuading him to agree that her end not constitute “a novel agony.” Instead of fearing it when it comes, “she and Death, acquainted / Meet tranquilly as friends.” Where in the terrible courtroom death has been presented as an enemy to be feared, and the meeting with death a dreadful punishment in itself, by the poem’s close all terror has been defanged.

This perhaps is the desired effect of Dickinson’s repeated poetic expeditions into the realm of death, and her working-out of its implications. Writing these poems between 1860 and 1862, in whatever order they were initially composed, her project seems to be to make death’s acquaintance, to cultivate its friendship, to develop the consequences of such a friendship, and so to cease to fear it. Ultimately the optimal outcome is that the soul and Death nod cordially as they pass, and “there the matter ends.”

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Read My Sentence Steadily

Requiem and Other Poems, by Aharon Shabtai, translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole:

But it wore him out
and he collapsed—
and lay there barely alive,
his head against the wall,
lazy flies
wandering across his bald spot,
and one particularly imprudent
large fly
indifferently
picking at his nose.

Since Israel began its devastating onslaught into Gaza, there has been a necessary, indispensable effort to amplify Palestinian voices, literary and otherwise. It is also, if differently, necessary and indispensable to pay attention to the Jewish and Israeli voices, literary and otherwise, working to come to terms not just with events since October 7, 2023, but also with the historical, political, and cultural context in which Israel and the Jews, both Israeli and not, are inescapably implicated. The poet Aharon Shabtai, whose work I did not know until I came across a review of Requiem and Other Poems, is one of those voices. Reading it, I found this statement from Publisher’s Weekly, quoted in the Poetry Foundation’s profile, to be apt: “His is ‘a voice mostly elided from American mappings of the Israel/Palestine question: acute, unblinking, unafraid to question, and aware of the stakes.’” The poem I have quoted from above, “Parable of the State,” is a devastating example, as it looks unflinchingly at what it costs to make cleansing your home of an Other your only and ultimate goal. It is only common sense that the discussion going on within Israel about “the Israel/Palestine question” is more complex than we in the United States usually hear about, even if that complexity does not now rise to the level of active popular resistance against the wars the Israeli government is prosecuting. I am not suggesting this one book of poems accounts for that complexity, though Peter Cole’s introduction suggests that the body of Shabtai’s work points in that direction. I am suggesting that grappling with “the Israel/Palestine question” should mean seeking out voices like Shabtai’s to place alongside the Palestinian voices so desperately in need of amplification.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #59

Boston-based Debra Cash writes about and consults on the arts, in particular dance, primarily for The Arts Fuse, a curated, online independent journal created in June 2007. She also is a very fine poet whom I might not have discovered had I not subscribed to The Arts Fuse soon after its inception.

Cash’s Who Knows One is her debut collection of 39 poems (pages are unnumbered), some of which, according to a cover review, are “based on stories, language, and associations with the Passover Haggadah.”*

Neither Jewish nor deeply informed about the Jewish faith, I approached the poems in this volume as I do the work of any poet, asking, for example: Do the poems “speak” in a voice anyone might hear and understand? What makes them work? What do they reveal about how the poet uses language? After reading the volume several times, I found myself by turns awed, delighted by the unexpected way that Cash gets us to “see” (as in her fine poem “The Raccoon”), and wondering why I had not come across her poetry before.

Many of the poems in Who Knows One are short; some are no more than five or six lines long. The longest, the apocalyptic “The Ten Plagues of Egypt,” runs to two-and-a-half pages but it is in no way over-long. Each stanza is self-contained and replete with highly evocative, sometimes even repulsive, imagery: the “river turned to blood”; the “plague of frogs . . . recoiling from touch”; vermin that are “the plague of the disgraced, the invisible laying claim, laying their eggs in heaps of the future”; the “plague of boils . . . self-hatred pulsing through the shallow dish of skin, domes of pain finally visible”; “a death of panting.” These are hell-plagues, as horrible as they are unimaginable to encounter. And then just five words bring this poem to its simple and stunningly powerful conclusion, its only possible ending: “That there is nothing after.”

Sometimes, Cash writes in the unmistakable voice of the story-teller and may even start out saying to her listeners, “Let me tell you a story. . . .” (”Our Taskmasters”) or “It came to pass. . . .” (”Wine, the Third Cup”). In the beautifully realized three-stanza, nine-line poem below, Cash exposes strength and weakness, revelation and cover-up, the truth and the lie:

Korekh

The scholar Hillel
took matzah and bitter herbs
and bit down.
The rabbis amended his practice
so that we smother the bitter
in the sweet.
It is still there,
bitterness,
but the tongue reaches out for apples.

In some poems, Cash speaks directly as “I” or “we,” part of the narrative and bound not just to remember and repeat the story but to give it its fullest meaning, as in the six rhythmically fast-moving couplets that comprise “Matzah.“ In a few poems, such as “Portal,” she foretells the story and then follows it up rather harshly with what she titles “Whipping chant #3” that she tucks on the second page of the poem near the bottom: “Where do you get off / I was only doing what was best / Can’t you put it behind you.”

Maureen Doallas, ‘Who Knows One’ by Debra Cash

The full-length poetry debut by Annie Wenstrup, a Dena’ina poet from Anchorage, Alaska, is the impressive The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2026), a collection composed of an assemblage of remarkably-precise lyric poems articulating her immediate present, from cultural figures to what the cover copy describes as “the lived experiences of an Alaskan Native person and the histories of unresolved cultural violence [.]” Through an opening cluster and seven sections—“GGUGGUYNI TRANSCRIBES THE ARCHIVES,” “THE BLUE WING,” “POLICIES AND PROCEDURES,” “PERFORMANCE ART,” “RETROSPECTIVE: A MILLION CATACLYSMS LIVE INSIDE MY BODY,” “THE CURATOR’S OFFICE” and “FUTURE EVENTS”—Wenstrup speaks to cultural violence, erasure and revision, and the losses that continue to be felt, all framed through and against the argument of depiction, much of which has too long been shaped by those from the outside. “I imagine // the portraits of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s papoose,” she writes, as part of “Pretending to Be a Woman, I Roam, the Museum,” a poem that sits in the book’s untitled preface section, “Keep America Beautiful’s Crying Indian, / Mattel’s Eskimo Barbie, Disney’s Pocahontas, // and how they must face each other after the lights / darken, how they must wipe off war paint, how / they must unfeather their hair.”

Writes of cataclysms and depictions, Wenstrup articulates the voice and stories of Ggugguyni, named for the Dena’ina Athabaskan word for the raven, such as the opening poem, “Sukdu’a,” that writes: “Once Ggugguyni in her human form / walked by the river. She left her right eye / behind as a lookout. The eye saw the Dena’ina // draw near and it called to Ggugguyni. / Ggugguyni cried to the Dena’ina, Don’t touch / but watch! She tossed her eye into the air // three times. It looks out for your luck she said.” Her lines are sharp, enough to bleed. Through the voice of Ggugguyni, she articulates the frame of the museum, of the archive, shaping a context from within the context of that lived experience, offering portraits, transcriptions and self-portraits, working as a reclamation (comparable to elements of Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel’s ongoing work), and to navigate what might be seen as contradiction. “I ate and the fireweed blazed.” begins “As Persephone,” “Roadside blooms / snared roadkill while asphalt caught leaves, the way / calloused hands snag silk.” Writing through and around references to murdered and missing indigenous women to JonBenét Ramsey, Jackson Pollack, Rube Goldberg and Wile E. Coyote, each element speaks to not only loss but the need for agency, even in death. “How beautiful, how lovely the women // are. If missing,” she writes, as part of “Ghost Pixels,” “I hope they’re not dead. / When they die, we dissect their lives / into made-for-TV docu-dramas like bodies // preserved in formaldehyde. Blonde hair floats / on screen. Pale, blue-eyed women echo / here.”

rob mclennan, Annie Wenstrup, The Museum of Unnatural Histories

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to ourselves, helps us tell each other what it is like to be alive. It is not simple work, for its raw material is complexity. It is not easy work, for it demands a constant balancing act between passion and precision. Like most labors of the disciplined imagination we call creativity, it may not look like work at all. But it is the kind of work that helps us see the world and ourselves more clearly so we can love it and each other more deeply.

Elizabeth Alexander — the fourth poet in history to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration when she welcomed Barack Obama to the White House with her eternal poem “Praise Song for the Day” — takes up the question of what it means and what it takes to be a poet in Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales (public library). She writes:

I am a poet, having lived my life by and through the word. To me, being a poet not only means making poems. It also means being attuned and reverent to the power of distilled, precise words in the form of poems but also as carriers of souls… Being a poet means I believe in patterns, in serendipity. I follow the logic of Muriel Rukeyser when she says, describing islands, “O for God’s sake / they are connected / underneath.”

[…]

Poets — if we live up to our calling — are guided by a strange courage that takes us into thickets of self and society without fully knowing the answers, to bring into form what we see and seek to understand. We offer what we find to community, for the poem does not live until it has been set forth to be taken in by others.

If the pattern of revelation is woven on the enchanted loom of the poet’s imagination, its weft and warp are connection and contradiction: The poet’s job is to “make community through our words, and through listening”; it is also “to ask the mind to embrace paradox.” With an eye to Baldwin, she observes that great writing — truly transformative writing — “haunts you and makes you change your mind, and then change it again,” leaving you “multidimensional and enlarged.” Echoing Baldwin’s own insistence that “talent is insignificant [for] beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” she attests that such potency is achieved only through “discipline, without which there is no art” — something she first learned in her fourteen years of classical training as a dancer.

Maria Popova, How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction

San Pedro River Review, one of my favorite poetry journals, published this poem in the fall of 2019. In December of the same year, I included “Locoweed” in my nominations for the Pushcart Prize (as a 2018 Pushcart honoree, I had the privilege of submitting my own nominations). I’d not met Chera Hammons. Her name slipped out of memory—until April 2 of this year, when Chera approached me at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, Oklahoma, and introduced herself. Chera was one of Scissortail’s featured poets. Before the festival concluded, I got to hear her read. I purchased a copy of Salvage List, which includes “Locoweed,” and Chera inscribed it.

For me this unassuming poem is a source of multiple surprises—from discovering it in the pages of San Pedro River Review, to meeting Chera at Scissortail, to re-discovering it in Salvage List, and then diving into the lines as I prepared to write about the poem here.

Locoweed is one of the potentially deadly surprises latent in plant life, like the cardiac glycosides in oleander. Here, locoweed is sentient. It is “certain of itself.” It waits “for the horses to believe in their hunger.” Don’t we all believe in our hunger? Don’t we want to believe the promise of green, the lies about goodness?

David Meischen, A Blur of Consequence

One thing I really like about the Internet Archive website — which becomes ever more essential as Google books degrades into complete uselessness — is that when you log in it shows you a page of suggestions of books you might be interested in. (Presumably on the basis of your previous borrowings, which in my case are rather eclectic.) Last week it suggested I might like The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry, which sounds at first glance beyond twee, except that it was edited in 1946 (an interesting moment) by none other than Alfred Noyes. If he’s known now at all I suppose it is for The Highwayman, which lives on at least in the UK as a particularly beautifully illustrated children’s book, but Noyes (1880-1958) was a hugely prolific, popular and highly skilled British narrative poet. He was a transatlantic literary celebrity, who traveled widely in America throughout his adult life and unusually had a high-profile reputation in both countries. He used to appear liberally in anthologies for reading to children — like The Book of a Thousand Poems that I wrote about in this piece — and I wish he still did because he wrote some of the best verse for reading aloud at bedtime, including one of my absolute favourites, the very funny ‘The New Duckling’ (recommended also for any readers with a pompous teen around the place) and the deliciously romantic ‘Sherwood’: […]

I have a cautionary tale about reading The Highwayman, however. Once when my elder boys were about 4 and 6 my husband and I had been arguing about what was OK for them to watch on TV. I was much more cautious than he was about them seeing films that might be too old for them and he thought I was being precious about it since (admittedly) they never seemed remotely traumatised. One evening when they were in bed — they had bunk beds at this point — I said The Highwayman to them both. They listened in complete silence all the way through. It’s pretty long and I was thinking smugly to myself how well this was going. After I finally got to the end, enjoying it enormously myself, there was a pause, then my younger son wailed, “But they’re both dead!” and burst into tears, and my elder son leant over the top of the upper bunk to peer at me and said rather censoriously, “I don’t think that was really appropriate for us, Mummy”. So that was me told: film violence is fine, but verse violence is not.

Victoria Moul, A good sword and a trusty hand

“Ouroboros” does what it says on the tin. The image of the snake/dragon eating itself becomes a wage-slave,

“To get to work
To buy the fare
To take train
To get work
To buy fare
To take train
To light train
On fire”

Humans aren’t built to do the same thing over and over to infinity. Mindless repetition will lead to breakage and rash actions. Not an original idea, but the staccato repetition and terse rhythm underline the point.

“With One’s Own Eyes” is a series of wryly observed vignettes on how to find one’s own humanity when life feels like a rush to keep up in a bombardment of FOMO-induced doom-scrolling. Crockford reminds readers that taking space to sit and be isn’t a waste of time and could be an act of rebellion in a life that asks us to be always connected and accept dismissal from people who are fixated on the next thing instead of seeing the human in front of them.

Emma Lee, “With One’s Own Eyes” C M Crockford (Moonstone Press) – book review

It’s possible (likely?) that lit magazine editors are tired of reading poems after “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. However, I’m not tired of reading them. How about you?

Like a game of telephone, I love it when poets use the device to riff on (and transform) the well known poem. And even if using the model limits your chances of publication (I imagine you’ll have to be VERY creative at this point to get one of these noticed), so what. Copying Stevens is a terrific generative writing exercise. […]

Famously, the poem is in 13 short sections, what Stevens called “sensations,” and if experience was his intention, I think the poem succeeds.

You can, for example, feel the stillness. For me, it opens with some of the most memorable language about stillness, and it achieve that — ironically — by noticing movement:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Here are some other qualities that attract me to this poem:

• It’s haunted.
• It’s fragile.
• It’s alive — and watching/waiting.
• It’s both vast (20 mountains!) and intimate/small (“the eye of a blackbird”).

And finally, Stevens closes with some of the most memorable language I’ve read about ongoingness:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.   

That “sensation” captures a moment by freezing it, another kind of stillness, which circles back to the beginning of the poem.

Carolee Bennett, “Thirteen Ways of Looking” Poems After Wallace Stevens

This week I had what was, for me, a unique experience: I enjoyed a filmed version of a poem much more than I had previously appreciated the poem on its own. It happened in a film-poem workshop run by a friend, who showed it on a large TV screen, a little like when we used to watch educational programmes in school. But this was much more illuminating than any poetry I’ve ever seen in a BBC arts documentary.

The challenge of turning poetry into film is that it needs constant visualisation. Most attempts, if they don’t simply go for footage of someone writing [cut to candle-lit quill nib dipping into ink] or reading aloud [cut to actor reciting from an old book into the middle distance], tend to head down the gently literalising route of stitching together a few key picturesque images [cut to lake water lapping on the shore as a crackly recording of W.B. Yeats quavers “I will arise and go now”].

But because poems are more than their images, such treatments ultimately feel reductive rather than enhancing. As W.H. Auden reflected in a lecture on “Poetry and Film” given to the North London Film Society in 1936, “highly developed metaphors cannot be included in the film medium”. He also observed that “a strong sound image added to a strong visual image tends to cancel out both”. Auden had recently finished work on Night Mail (1936), a General Post Office Film Unit documentary for which he was asked to write some verse. The result shows how well he understood the need to balance the two sets of images merging in the viewer’s mind, from literal descriptions of a train speeding through the night — “This is the night mail crossing the border” — to lives fleetingly imagined just out of sight in the framing darkness e.g.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches;
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course
They slumber on with paws across.

The film-poem that I watched this week, however, does the differently difficult thing of taking a poem already composed with a self-sufficient complexity, and finding new images that echo, interpret and enhance its words. The poem is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”, and the film is by the Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait. You can read the poem here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_of_Gerard_Manley_Hopkins/The_Leaden_Echo_and_the_Golden_Echo

— and watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L080KSBxemg

Why does this work so well? Hopkins is a famously vivid seer of things: the “silk-sack clouds” of early autumn, for example, or “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim”. So on the face of it, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” is a curious choice to film, the text is a torrent of words that passes quickly over its concrete nouns into a semi-abstract incantation about mortality and immortality.

But here, I think, is why it was an inspired choice. As a voiceover — read with precise care by Tait herself — the poem becomes both meaning and music over the film’s images (Hopkins said of it: “I never did anything more musical”). This vocalised presentation also draws out the dramatic qualities of the verse […]

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Latch or Catch or Key

In my previous mini review of Flammable Solid, I wrote that you seem to be a writer whose craft is in the service of discovery, and that sparked off some interesting conversations between us. I’d like to explore that idea a little further. Why do you write? And what does the creative process look like, for you?

“It would not be a lie to admit that the ‘service of discovery’ takes a number of forms. I live in what can sometimes be a constant state of narrative assessment, with the need to reflect and consider everything in order to comprehend it fully. Writing has become a tool of service and increasingly memory: building a regular practice has become transformative and a pillar of my mental wellness.

I am also annoyingly prolific to some friends, until they accept I’m still, most of the time, using poetry as a mental health coping strategy. Some days I write because I want to, or I need to, simply to make sense of the ridiculousness of the current reality we find ourselves being exposed to. Other times, it has become an anchor to my perception.

My first pamphlet was very much a series of stand-alone pieces. FM allowed me to embrace the strength of the narrative arc in poetic terms.”

Forest Management seems to be grappling with an ecology vaster and more intricately-patterned than that which presents itself readily to us in our day-to-day reality. Could you talk a little bit about that?

“There is always more to reality than we are capable of seeing, for all manner of reasons. How we have been educated, how we were bought up, how we are treated will all feed into this ability to perceive. There were periods in my early childhood where food and money were both luxuries, and these things still influence decisions on a daily basis. My working class background may now be a memory, but it colours a lot of what now helps me navigate the complexity of current existence.

I feel too many of us are being distracted right now with trivial things, or are simply unable to consider the ecology of existence itself. The damage being done by human beings to the planet will continue to be exacerbated by climate change, and the movement of human beings across the planet has been a part of an ecosystem for millennia. The former will now make the latter an even greater concern.

Everything is connected to everything else on Earth. We are part of a vast and increasingly damaged ecosystem. There are very real threats to our individual stability, our ability to live in harmony with all that surrounds us. It is only when we are directly threatened that the fragility of those positions becomes apparent. It is time I think to accept our own culpability and actively pursue solutions to restore balance.

Those who have more than they need should be helping those with less. We need to return to an ecology based on empathy and co-operation. At the heart of this book is the acceptance that to make things better, sometimes parts of your own existence will need to be sacrificed in order to force that change upon yourself. What you leave behind sometimes becomes more significant than what you are left with.

This story demonstrates that horror can also be a transformative construct.”

*

Having read Forest Management a few times over, I think it is this sentiment of a transformative reckoning – the moment where pain, difficulty, horror become an awakening and a turn towards something else – that sticks with me. This is a theme that has been present in S’ previous work, but with Forest Management it comes to the fore as a narrative arc. In that sense, as well as a horror story, the pamphlet could also be read as a classic Hero’s Quest. I’m sure S would baulk at the idea of being cast as a capital-H Hero, but the ingredients are there. There is the sense of a struggle, moments of doubt and despair, and a bargain that has to be struck in order to move forward:

“these trees / will not / let me leave / without selling them / my soul”

But also:

“This germination will be mine.”

[…]

S. Reeson (she/they) is a working-class, neurodivergent poet whose space and shape poetry is underpinned by mental health, existential angst and the current state of the planet. After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest in 2018 they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which was included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 by Bloomsbury/One World. This poem was then reproduced by The Daily Telegraph and read on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night programme.

A debut pamphlet with accompanying art and photography, Flammable Solid, was published in November 2022 by Flight of the Dragonflies Press. In April 2023 a chapbook, No Gloss… No Veneer, No Filter was produced by Back Room Poetry. They were shortlisted in April 2026 for Poem of the Month by Verve Poetry Press, and have been published in over 30 magazines and anthologies, including Under the Radar. Both their poetry and photography has been formally exhibited.

In 2026 they were selected as Poet in Residence for the Leigh Art Trail in Essex, and a Writer in Residence at Metal Southend as part of the Essex Book Festival, where they also taught poetry on behalf of the South Bank Centre and the Poet in Every Port initiative. They are on the Steering Committee and an advocate for the Southend Creatives CIC.

They are currently putting the finishing touches to their first collection.

Victoria Spires, A sylvan reckoning

Maria Nazos is the author of The Slow Horizon that Breathes (World Poetry Books, 2023), longlisted for the Angelo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, a collection of poems translated from the Greek poet Dimitra Kotoula, and a collection of poems, PULSE (Omnidawn, 2026), listed as one of Ms. Magazine’s Reads for the Rest of Us: The Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026. Her poetry, essays, and translations are forthcoming or have appeared in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and The Adroit. Maria has held a wide range of jobs, including whale-watching boat attendant, table dancer, and, arguably, the worst waitress on Cape Cod. If she spilled Pinot Noir on you, she apologizes. You can find her at www.marianazos.com.

How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare?

The way my first book changed my life was that it made me realize it’s okay to wait for work to become true.

I feel like I really, really rushed the river with my initial collection. In fact, I don’t really talk about it much for that reason. It’s a sore subject, but like most wounds, it’s worth returning to the scar tissue. Nonetheless, it taught me something I don’t think I could have learned any other way.

The biggest difference between that book and PULSE is that PULSE took sixteen years to write. I was so determined and so aggressive about cranking out my first book. What PULSE ultimately taught me is that sometimes you have to wait a maddening amount of time for something to come out right. It isn’t on your timeline. In fact, I think the more I tried to force it, the less worth it it became. The more I let the work tell me what it needed, the better it got. I think there’s so much wisdom in the waiting, even in the worst moments of it. Looking back, that’s probably the biggest lesson both books taught me.

How did you come to poetry?

I wanted to write fiction. I loved reading fiction, especially as an undergrad, and I just assumed that’s what I would write. What became immediately apparent to me was that, frankly, I just wasn’t that good. And I think people always want to jump in and go, “No, no, that’s not true.” But it’s true. Could I have become a good fiction writer with enough time? Sure. I believe most of us can become good at almost anything if we devote enough time.

But one of the greatest gifts in life is realizing what you’re naturally inclined toward versus what you’re constantly forcing. Meanwhile, my poetry just kept getting more and more attention. So, at some point I just naturally began to follow that.

I’m not advocating for the path of least resistance. I think the lesson is paying attention to where something feels alive. For me, poetry was where that happened. And it’s strangely liberating to accept in life where you suck. We’re taught to think we can do anything. That’s not true, and giving ourselves permission to accept our shortcomings opens us up to being honest with ourselves, our work, and our due north.

As I like to joke, but not really, my short stories just kept getting shorter and shorter until they became poems, which makes no sense, given the amount that I talk.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Maria Nazos (rob mclennan)

This section of Reclamation revolves around the Frost line “Something we were withholding made us weak.” Frost is claiming in this part of the poem that what really turned the British colonists into Americans was the surrender of themselves to this new land—he says that explicitly in the next two lines—and that it was the unwillingness to leave the teat of the Motherland that was making them weak.

I reframed this line first by breaking it in half at the word “were” so that it ends the sentence “It’s just / something we were.” The Frost line doesn’t always work as the pivot of my responses but it does here. The speaker, an adult remembering himself at around ten years old, first defines himself against another place, the state next door, a place he honestly doesn’t know well at that age. It’s just not here, and that’s enough for him because he exists in a place and time where allegiances are gut-level and local and the stakes are everything right now and won’t be remembered tomorrow.

Brian Spears, Reclamation part 8

It’s rejection season, as last week’s CWC Office Hours confirmed. Many writers are hearing back from multiple publications at once, and naturally “no” makes up the majority of the responses.

We talked at length about the questions rejection brings up: Is it the work? Is it the market? Is there something useful to learn from this, or is the best next move simply to send the work someplace else? How do we recover without letting this be an unhelpful pronouncement on the merits of our writing, or even less helpful, a foreshadowing of what’s to come (or not to come)? […]

If you tend to experience rejection as a blanket assessment of your worth—aka: “my submission was rejected” immediately becomes a sinking feeling of inescapable inevitability—your response will feel out of proportion to the event itself. This, in turn, can lead to despair, cynicism, and ultimately quitting. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Having a submission rejected produces a feeling—an uncomfortable one, certainly, but a feeling nevertheless. A feeling registers in the body, and whether it dissipates quickly or lingers depends partly on the story we attach to it. There are plenty of writers who hold rejection lightly; you can be one of them, but it takes deliberate practice. It takes identifying how and what you are making it mean for you, and actively choosing a different meaning. You are—we are—very often at the mercy of our first thought, but you don’t have to be at the mercy of your next thought.

There is an evolutionary basis for this sensitivity: humans are social creatures, as you might have gleaned, and exclusion carried real consequences for survival for millennia. Unless you train it otherwise, the nervous system can register a literary rejection as a form of social threat, even when what’s actually happened is that someone sitting at a laptop has clicked “declined” on Submittable. But “this poem wasn’t right for this issue” is not a reflection on your worthiness as a person or writer—that is not what has been passed over, nor what was being assessed in the first place. […]

Your writing has likely already given you more than almost anything else in your life ever could. It has given you thousands of hours in which to puzzle through thought and feeling, expanding your capacity for both. It has allowed you to experience your memories again in all their vividness, to draw on your inner landscape to create spaces another might enter, all through the vehicle of the page. It has challenged and delighted you. Maybe it’s even been the longest and most significant relationship of your life.

You write because you need and love to write, not because you need and love to be published. It can be hard to remember that in the moment you’re faced with the sting of rejection, but your comeback rate—the time it takes you to remember what truly matters—is important. It is what motivates you to return to the work. It’s what helps you stay in this for the long haul.

Protect your appetite for writing. Don’t lose it to your appetite for submission and validation. Thank your next rejection for giving you the chance to practice this reframing and for reminding you what matters most.

Maya C. Popa, Adjusting Your Factory Settings

I long ago came to the realization that my poems are usually different from others writing around and near me, both in the real world and virtual spaces I inhabit as a creative. It may go back to that realization I once had in an MFA classroom of going around the room and everyone saying WHY they write poems. Or what they want poems to do, both as writers and readers. How no one had the same answer and it explained a lot about why I felt like workshops in the program were like banging your head against a wall with everyone telling you to bang faster or harder or with more intention. While I would still way I am often unhappy with my fiction exploits, it’s usually my own narrative voice that irks me. I get tired of myself, even in the span of a short story. The poems, however, feel like snippets and much less insufferable. The plays on the other hand, nicely eliminate the narrative voice entirely leaving only the story frame-worked in dialogue. This may be why I’ve taken to it so wholeheartedly this past year.

Kristy Bowen, the science of stories

Recently I was asked the themes of my third collection of poems, Call Me Yes, forthcoming from The Word Works in October 2026. I launched into a description of the book: it traces the breakdown of my long first marriage, the terror and excitement of dating again as an over-50 woman, and the tumble into new love. Threaded through the collection are short lyric poems about living with chronic pain. Ah, love and pain, my friend concluded.

Yes, but. How did I leave out sex? Middle-aged lady sex, to be precise. The book is lousy with sex poems. Perhaps I left it out because – despite writing and publishing these poems for the past decade, despite the often wildly enthusiastic response the poems receive when I trot them out at readings – I’m still burning my female / belly with shame, as I write in “Divorce Dinner for Breakfast.”

In popular culture, when middle-aged and older women show up at all, we are most often depicted as either asexual or as cougars, somewhat pathetically pursuing younger men. (No need to get into the double standard here – oo wee.) But, you know what? Many of us continue to be sexual beings. In fact, my libido increased in middle age. Still, I could not have set out to write a book about sex. But because I was doing what I tell my students to do – write what is pounding up inside them – often it was sex: the act itself, the frustrated act, the sheer fact of desire. And because middle-aged and older women are so often silenced or dismissed or worse, mocked, the sheer act of writing our desires is a political act. As the poem, “Tongued,” which opens the book’s second section ends: the tongue writes its own / constitution right here in our beds.

The sex poems take many forms: an ode to the multiple orgasm titled, appropriately, “Ode to the Multiple Orgasm”; an “Abecedarian to the Aging Female Body”; a sonnet in the voice of the clitoris; a poem of extended metaphor; a goofy compendium of the bot (or human?) messages I received on dating apps (it suck been lonely); an even goofier riff on online dating titled “DrBigBeef, or Internet Dating Over 50.” The word desire appears at least eight times in the collection. One poem is actually called “Desire.” I brought an early draft to my writing group and the poet Venus Thrash, who tragically passed away a few years ago, far too young, looked at my short-lined straggly poem and pronounced, “Long lines are sexy, Sarah.” And she was right: the final version of the poem, with longer lines, is sexier, more languid perhaps.

Let Our Aging Bodies Sing – guest post by Sarah Browning (Trish Hopkinson)

The ache returns with its hands in its pockets.
It sets down its suitcase and hangs its head.
I open the door and say: only for one night,
and only on the couch. There’s a nor’easter;

set down your suitcase inside the storm door.
Don’t get any ideas though you’ve been here
before. And don’t get too comfy on the couch.
Let me have my pot of tea and my quiet.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returning Ache

When I’m asked how I go about preparing for a reading, I say the poems are always the easy bit – because they’re done, they’re sorted, they just need read out. It’s the spontaneous stuff in between that I need to carefully rehearse.

This is one reason why I’m dubious, to say the least, when someone shows me a poem they’ve just rattled off, still hot against the page; a poem they’re reluctant to revise in case they edit the immediacy out of it. I worry that this is less spontaneous expression that deserves to remain so than something closer to incontinence. Yes, I know there are exceptions. I do occasionally write poems with minimal revision, poems that arrive almost fully fledged, but even with these I usually spent days fussing and fretting over the lines in my head before setting them down on paper, and then days – weeks, even – scrutinising them for imperfections. That bloody comma!

Though my first drafts often come very quickly – scribbled down on anything to hand, as often as not the flyleaf of whatever poetry collection I happen to be reading at the time (because we all know that words come from words) – I’m always keen to get it into typescript as quickly as possible. That way it looks a bit like a real poem even though it’s ragged and dull and saying nothing much yet about anything. And the words are easier to change on a keyboard, the lines and phrases can be quickly shifted around. All the time I’m listening for the music that carries the lines forward. Some argue that the drafts should remain handwritten as long as possible because the words and syntax are different when the line is typed, but I need to write as close as I can to the speed of thought.

Then I begin to root around for something interesting or perplexing that might have appeared in there, something the manipulation of the lines has introduced: an image, a phrase, a coalition of words. I expand on this, draw it out to see what it’s trying to explain to me … And the ‘real’ poem, if it’s going to grow at all, grows from there.

John Glenday, Off the Cuff

Last night I was in conversation with Helen Mort at Juno Bookshop in Sheffield. It was lovely to see Helen, who is both a good friend and a brilliant writer. We decided to improvise a call and response poetry reading – Helen read a poem, and then I read a poem and then we talked about some of the ideas in the background of the work. We hadn’t planned this at all – but I think it worked really well – perhaps because I’ve felt like my work has always been in conversation with Helen’s work for years. Below is a photo of us looking pleased with ourselves for pulling off a call and response poetry reading!

Now that the autumn is here, I’ve got quite a few readings and events on – which I’m going to try and make a list of below. If any readers can make it to any of these events, do come and introduce yourself! One of the joys of writing this Substack has been meeting people from all over the UK who are reading both our absolute nonsense and our more thoughtful articles!

Kim Moore, Poetry Diary

always an ache
in the bones when we yearn for
the suburbs, ascent into credible
air. but no, we will not go. we do
the quadrilles of confinement, up
and down this old particular. left
or right. ours is a compass without
cardinals, is a bright dial hanging
in the orange air.

Fran Lock, “HAWKSMOOR”

When I’m writing poems, I eavesdrop on birds more than people. When I’m writing fiction, I eavesdrop on people more than birds. […]

Reading somewhere that I’m a poet for people who say they don’t like poetry. Is that like being a chef for people who say they don’t eat food? Or a lake for people who say they can’t swim?

Maggie Smith, Scrapbook in Vignettes

Back in April, I was poet in residence at a festival, too, a festival and residency hosted in a crypt repurposed as an art gallery, right next to a historical church in London. Many things happened during that residency that will stay with me, but there is one in particular that haunts me. There was a young man there – not a crypt apparition, nor one of us poets-in-residence but a young man in flesh and blood who slept in the church garden, in a sleeping bag. It didn’t take me long to conclude, from silent clues, that he must have been an asylum seeker, one of those who had, eventually, been granted asylum then abandoned to the streets with no support or resources. His command of English wasn’t great but he got by, and every evening, when us poets held our open mic down in the crypt, he would leave the crisp April cold of the church garden to descend into the bone-biting cold of the crypt and listen to us. He’d sit or stand quietly in the corner nearest the exit, and listen to us speak of our loves, our lives, our grief, our anger. He always looked like he was paying attention, immersing himself in this foreign language, trying to absorb it, desperately.

Seeing that the weirdos who spent their days pottering about the house of the dead didn’t avoid him or chase him away, that we stopped by to chat with him every once in a while, ask if he’d eaten, and that he was able to use the facilities and make himself a hot cup of tea unbothered, he worked up some courage, little by little. (One of us asked him, at one point, a question they then regretted. They asked something like “where are you from?” upon which, reportedly, the young man pointed to the ground of the crypt and said “here”.) Eventually, one sunny morning, he came to one of us to ask for directions. He wanted to find the nearest job seekers’ centre. All he wanted was to be able to work, to live his life. We never saw him again after that, and I pray he’s safe now, that he has a roof under his head, a job with a salary, and food to eat; that one day, the poetry of this language will no longer be a ghost in the crypt.

His name, as I remember it, is Mukhtar. A name that won’t make the headlines. Mukhtar never told us his story, and we were too embarrassed, perhaps too ashamed of ourselves to ask. A story that will never make the headlines, a story like many others’. I have no idea what he must have lived through to end up homeless, to end up calling a crypt something akin to home. I can only try to imagine, and I will most likely fail.

I think of him still, listening to poetry in the cold of the crypt, as I watch the men wishing him and others like him dead infecting the news with their hate, men who would laugh at our poems.

Mukhtar, whose name means “the chosen one”, I’m sorry we have failed you.

Maria Cohut, A headline for Mukhtar, whose story won’t be on the news

A long time ago, I was Writer in Residence across the North of Ireland for The Poetry Society. It was my first visit since I’d lived there on our old family street, Obins Street, in the early 1980s, where I found myself many times thrust against a wall and looking down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle for simply existing. A writer is a dangerous person. We keep and steward notes for the days when we need them, and when the world needs them. The family had lived on John Street before that.

I think five of the poems I wrote during that time ended up in my first book, The Prize. But given the determination in recent days of those who would still keep the North of Ireland held in its colonial grip, and undo decades of work towards peace and community, I found myself looking back into my archive. […]

The bomb that took out
the town centre
killed my cousin Tony Brown.

His big round face singing songs
at Uncle Clancy’s in Criagavon
on a Friday night, not really my uncle
but all O’Neill’s are related by soul and time.
Tony’s wife Kathleen’s brown eyes.

There is no such thing as middle ground.
I put flowers in the middle of the road.

John Siddique, Two Poems of Portadown

Friends keep asking how I feel about retiring as if it’s a one stop shopping kind of deal. I will definitely keep directing Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women every September in La Conner, WA and I hope to be teaching “Taking Flight” in a gorgeous castle in Bordeaux, France and Poetry on the Water with Anil Oommen, in the magical backwaters of Kerala, if I am lucky…Perhaps be able to do more writing. […]

But I am also aware that I have a time limited offer on this planet, in this physical form. What do I want to do with the next twenty years of my life. And that’s an optimistic number. Both of my parents passed away in their early 70’s which is right around the corner. No time to delay!

It’s a weird feeling looking towards the big R. How long will I be able to travel? A long train ride across Europe? Perhaps the Orient Express if it’s still running or should I start with the Coast Starlight to Los Angeles to make sure I’m as enamored with trains as I think I am?

Susan Rich, Holding Fast to the Last Slice of Summer: Laughter, Poetry, Friends, and More

In the family room… there was a tv, our favorite chairs, a wagon wheel light hanging from an exposed beam… but the three clocks: a wooden heirloom on the mantle, one strange water clock on a table in the corner, and the grandfather beside the door, teaching my sister how to count even in her sleep, made the room feel as if it were something else… too informal for a living room, too focused on time for a den, so I named it the fireplace room, the room where Dad rigged a steel plate and wrought-iron arm hinged to swing a cast iron kettle or skillet from stone facing to the fire box for cooking, later, it became the dining room… but opposite the hearth and behind the desk, a bookcase spanned the back wall, and on its lowest shelf, a bit lost among seminary books, history, art, and politics, was the black cover of my Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, a gift from Mother. Once, folded inside its pages for safekeeping, was my faded sketch of Montresor’s catacombs beneath his stone house in “The Cask of Amontillado”. The drawing’s thin lines, more determined than accurate, led the eye down a meandering and descending hall to a man in jester’s garb, the only blots of color on the page, moving toward a pile of skeletons, smudged in pencil, against a crumbling wall with an open doorway and the darkness beyond. I’ve no idea what happened to it.

The book taught me about the darker things in life, how our time is far too brief, then we disappear, how what we see is never what is. Like monsters, misunderstood, stomping through trees, they aren’t trying to hurt anyone. Like the thumping heart and the discolored eye, or the grave that’s covered too soon. Like bells jingling behind walls until there’s only silence. Like waking from childhood’s hour.

Its blessing wasn’t that Mother gave me something to read to direct my life the way she wanted, didn’t give me something hoping I would change or conform, though I’m certain she had her wishes. No. She gave me the pages she knew I wanted, the words she knew I needed. She gave me the world that would be mine. I didn’t know then how perfect her gift.

*

Decades later, near the end of a hard winter, seeing
her dead on the ER table, I thought of her gifting me
the book, of the many wonderful doors it opened,
of the mystery in her mind that pushed her
to give it to me, of the love she carried.

I swear, I could hear her voice in that room,
could see her chest swell and drop, her eyelids flutter.
I wanted her eyes open. I wanted to see her soul
one more time. But she was gone.

I kissed her forehead, and whispered
deep into her ear, willing my words to follow her.

Sam Rasnake, New hybrid: “The Basement Tapes: 12”

— Well, we are an exhausted body, an injured body, we writers, many, most? of us. We are dust, we dust, we are in a dust-up. Still, we persist. We will not be erased, though we have been pillaged. Though our work has been stolen. Though we be an injured body.

— Last post I talked about the years we might have left. (Is it ever too early to start thinking about your latter years? :) Memento Mori and all that. This one struck a chord — I got a lotta notes about that one and thank you.

— What I want for us as humans is more than just to live with the unbearable, the unthinkable, the violence, the injustice. As Lauren Berlant says in their book On the Inconvenience of Other People, “Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple, in the sense of resolved once and for all.” How can we go on asking better questions, repairing, when it’s all so overwhelming? How do we, as they say, “live on with.” Life is so grievable.

— How will we be when the dust settles? How many pennies do we leave in the rosebud ashtrays? How much ash? rosebuds?

Shawna Lemay, Dust and the Exhausted Body, the Injured Body

The poet of Ezham scents the grove with sandalwood;
ripe plantains sweeten the air,
inflorescences of tall bamboo
rise into it.
From metaphoric wilderness,
to the mythic southern island
the geography shifts beneath the traveller’s feet.

Uma Gowrishankar, For Valmiki, Kamban & Arasakesari

I love the fact that a yarn show for me is a wonderful blend of work and curiosity and playfulness. When we were getting everything ready to take with us for the weekend I even referred to the patterns as “our patterns” which shows that I feel very invested in this creative world of yarn. I now know much more about knitting and yarn than I have ever done, and I have Kath’s patterns memorised in a Pokédex kind of way, so I am pretty helpful when it comes to looking after things for her. I still am not quite sure about what happens if you knit something in 4-ply instead of DK, and am therefore not confident offering an answer on any such question, but there are always plenty of experts around me at events who do know such things.

There were lots of lovely compliments for Kath’s work during conversations over the two days, and I always love hearing these. In fact it makes my heart sing.

For me there were lots of first this weekend… the early morning shepherding of some sheep back into their pen, Yarndale versions of #SwishOrWaft, some human galloping in the aisles, and some wonderfully relaxing colouring-in time, along with my first ever experience of not feeling cold at any point during the show. It’s good to experience new things alongside the bits that I am expecting.

I love making the little videos to find out whether there is a preference for swishing or wafting whilst wearing a large shawl and love the panache with which people will get involved. It’s good to play. In fact I thrive on play and humour, so I am very grateful for all these kinds of interactions during the show, especially when there is also time for a gallop and neigh in the aisles with a like-minded soul. This makes this non-knitter feel like they have found their own little place to be amongst all things woolly.

I also found time in the quiet of Sunday morning before the show day began to stand on my own in my assigned sheep/cattle pen and draft a poem. It feels rather lovely to come home with some words to work with, and when this poem finds its place in the world it will be fun to remember exactly where it began its shaping.

Sue Finch, A SWISH, A GALLOP AND TWO LOOSE SCREWS

I am grateful for
days like these, the light,
the scent of woodsmoke,
a squirrel that stops
to stare at me, as if

it has no fear at all,
a tractor driver who
slows so the track’s dust
does not envelop me.
These gifts. My rich life.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ The seasons continue to confound us

This week: yellowing pears, oleander petals, the rattle of swans’ wings, the engines of our envy, and much more. Enjoy.

Last weekend at Lumb Bank a butterfly came into the cottage after dark and settled on my skirt, refused to fly away even as I walked around. Finally, it startled into a corner of my bedroom where it spent the night.

Next day I found it in the window above my writing desk. By the evening there was no sign of it.

I first came to Lumb Bank in 1998. I was in the dining room when it was announced that Ted Hughes had died. All morning, the door to the outside world kept blowing open and shut. This house has been far out at sea all night, I thought.

At Aldeburgh Poetry Festival in the early 2000s, I heard Christopher Reid perform extracts from the book of Hughes’ letters he had just edited. It was a chilly November morning, sober skies. Reid was reading a piece (from memory, I think it was a letter from Hughes to Ben Sonnerberg about the composition of Hughes’ The Jaguar) and as he got to the point in the letter where Hughes describes a bluebottle irritating him mid-poem in his room, those of us sitting close to the stage noticed a black butterfly circling Reid’s head. Very lightly, very deftly, it settled on the page of the book. A collective murmur rose from the crowd.

A black butterfly is thought to symbolise transformation, endings, and – in some traditions – a message from someone who has died. Readings vary slightly by culture: ominous in parts of Europe and Central America, auspicious in Japan, China, and the Philippines. Most modern interpretations read it as a phase closing rather than a warning (much like my understanding of the ‘death’ card in a tarot deck).

The night the Lumb Bank butterfly stayed in my room it rained with peculiar gravitas and I couldn’t sleep. It seemed as if the whole valley had been struck by something and it was ringing. The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills / Winds stampeding the fields under the window….

As I waited for morning, I thought about Hughes’ ‘blade-light…. Flexing like the lens of a mad eye’.

Helen Mort, A house at sea all night

i.m rachel blau duplessis (1941-2026)

/ i cannot face it: the diligent and scheduled day.
/ between endeavour and divide.
/ my cup runneth over. my cup becomes accustomed, is an eye.
/ what fresh hell is this? inside of which we recognise and formulate, traverse entrapment sadly.
/ a poem, aye. envoi of exhaustions. envoi of extremes.
/ to strive inside the limit and the light of it.
/ to swallow it, horoscope and gospel, down in one.
/ what is it – the necessary defect in our nature, a mercy owed to ignorance.
/ that keeps us here, softly espousing? […]

Fran Lock, AGLÆCA #2

At the Museo Nazionale Romano at Palazzo Altemps, we spend an entire slow afternoon with the Gods. There are sun-drenched terraces adorned with saffron murals of birds and plants; the sculpted stone limbs of Demeter and Apollo lounging in the high noon sun; amphorae and funerary reliefs and bones.

I am particularly drawn to Dionysus/Bacchus—always have been, with his pinecones and staff and grapes. I linger in rooms with him, wishing the sculpture would talk back to me. Like a child I covet his attention.

I have always longed for and feared the ecstatic. As a Scorpio, as a writer, I am always tugging at the precipice of ruin, peering behind its delicious curtain. I want the rush of abandon, and then I run from it. An erotic push-pull, where the threshhold is my kink.

Dionysus is the embodiment of The Me that Stretches Beyond Fear, into an erotic expanse that verges on the divine. It is the part of me that eats to excess and drinks and dances and gets lost in beauty and uses my sensuality as currency and lets go of expectation and order. Dionysus tells me to write poems, to lose my fucking mind. But it’s less about the wildness itself and more about what it takes to get there.

In Rome, the closest I get to bacchanalia is staying up late, laughing with my friend and the ghosts, drinking dark, thick wine and smoking a dozen slim Vogue cigarettes. My friend called our last night a “loopy giddy fever dream.” Dionysus would approve.

And then when things feel too heavy, I pull back on the ecstatic, march down the hill, pass through the scrim, and become good again.

Lisa Marie Basile, Missives from beautiful, bloated Rome

The academic whirlwind yanked me up into its funnel cloud this August with extra force, or so it seemed, after a sabbatical’s saner pace. Struggling with the workload, I thought with surprise, I do not want this. I definitely do not want to go to these endless workshops on how AI can help improve faculty efficiency. I want to take slow, inefficient walks in the woods, looking at mushrooms.

I was relieved, after that rush of meetings and paperwork, to settle into teaching. Preparing for class–reading, reconsidering old lesson plans (recently Rukeyser, O’Hara, Ginsberg, Plath)–I lose track of time. Running a discussion about literature or writing is all about giving texts and other humans the respect of unhurried attention.

Yet administrivia keeps pouring in, with deadlines that put firm boundaries on how much time I can give my students or my creative life. The latter involves its own administrative tasks, too: slipping a few submissions in before the windows close, checking proofs, booking a hotel for that writing festival, etc. When you get to the events, they’re often great. I LOVED the thoughtful conversation at the ecopoetry panel and reading I was a part of recently at Stone Soup Books. Blockage on the interstate, though, meant I broke speed limits getting there.

The unhurry-able process of writing, revising, and working to get poems in front of audiences has fruited lately, as a reminder of where rumination can lead.

Lesley Wheeler, Snailing along in the moonlight

If you ask me, I’ll probably say I’m not writing much. Because even I forget about the poor little thing. “My blog.” I periodically slip into sentences in conversations with friends mention of “my blog,” knowing none of them read it. There is invariably no reaction, or a furtive look away. “Blog,” I think, has come to mean long-winded all-about-me blather that no one wants to read, although if you put it up as a video on TickyTacky I guess it might be a viral Thing. I wonder if I called it “my Substack” if I’d get a different reaction, as that seems to be where the cool kids blog, at the moment. I had a podcast for a while, and a friend actually jokes about NOT listening to the podcast, as if I’d think that was funny, and I do fake-laugh just to make it okay. (But you know what, it’s not really okay.) In spite of this particular long-winded all-about-me blather of a post, some of my best works comes out on this blog: mini-essays, some, or prose poems, others. Not all of them, by any means. But as it turns out, this is my writing practice, this blog. Much to my surprise. And it won’t make me known to the world and has not garnered me many readers and will not turn into a published book, and I can’t turn around and try to publish these mini-essays/prose poems in lit mags because this blog is considered a published thing, and therefore no longer shiny new for most lit mags. I’m just pausing here to give myself credit for this practice. Turns out practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes purpose. It makes sanity. It makes a small grace. And I pause to thank you for reading.

Marilyn McCabe, It may be that when we no longer know what to do

A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:

thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl

In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:

The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.

As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.

[…]

I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.

Matthew Paul, September

As I was reading blog posts from past Septembers, I came across this fascinating poem possibility in this post from September 18, 2024:  “As I’ve been puttering this morning, I thought, I should write a poem with the title “Hildegarde of Bingen Forgets Her Feast Day.” The poem could go in several possible directions: she forgets because she is busy, she forgets because it no longer matters, she forgets because she has dementia.”  I went back to my files, and if I composed this poem, I didn’t do it on the computer.

Chances are good that I did nothing with this idea because a few days later, I was dealing with the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which left us without power for roughly 9 days, without internet for roughly a month, and boiling water until early December.  Again and again, I am a bit whipsawed when I think about all we have managed to survive.

Deep breaths–let me do something with poetry before it’s time to get ready for church–or just sit here and breathe deeply.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Guardians of Lesser Galaxies

At the beginning of 2023, I had my gallbladder taken out due to the presence of a stone so impressive that a someone from the surgical team came to find me afterwards to tell me she’d never seen anything like it. Naturally, I asked to keep it. They said no, but left it in a tube within my reach for a suspiciously long time. That same week, I discovered the poetry of Irish poet Eavan Boland. What a pair of gifts that week gave me. One of them looks better on the shelf, though. [photo]

The poem I came across first was The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me, and it stopped me in my tracks. For context, I read a lot of poems. Like, a lot. I’m also relatively easy to please, poetically speaking, which means that I read a lot of poems I like, like, a lot. It’s lovely. But very occasionally, I read a poem I can’t get out of my head, that I am compelled to play on repeat for weeks or months like I did in 1992 with my cassette of the Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat soundtrack (Jason Donovan version, obvs). I assume this happens to everyone (the poetry thing, not Joseph). I can never figure out exactly what the magic is that makes a poem shoot into my favourites like this, but maybe it’s more poetic that I don’t know. Either way, I fell hard for this one. […]

It’s possible that, in 2023, having had a small object recently removed, I was more than usually open to the idea of the enormity of tiny things. But I’m no less enchanted by this poem now than I was then. This collection, by 1990 already something like Boland’s seventh, is teeming with objects and specifics – her mother’s stockpot, a mug with a hunting scene, the ‘sugar-barley iron of a garden chair’ – which ground and colour the broad profundities and classical allusions that lie in seams in these poems. You won’t mistake this for cosy, domestic poetry. It uses those themes to tell us about women, and writing, and Ireland, and love, and the past, and the now. It’s remarkable writing, and I’m so happy to have spent time with it this week.

Eavan Boland only died in 2020, after a stellar career. I wish I’d found her earlier. But I’ve been making up for it and she’ll be making more appearances on this Substack. The gallstone, thankfully, will not.

Nia Broomhall, Week 27: Outside History

Circumstances being what they are, too numerous to mention here, I continue amid distraction and creative malaise. To counter the mood, and to educate myself, I turn to poetry. Often I buy or borrow books that are new to me for excitement or inspiration; this month, I’ve decided to do some re-reading. Since I’m not writing much myself these days, and not too thrilled with what little I have been drafting, it seems time to re-examine poetry that I really admire. Maybe I can learn a few things.

I’ve long been a fan of Elaine Terranova, whom I met many years ago in Philadelphia. I have all of her books but the latest (and will get to that one soon), but the one I’m re-reading is Not To, New and Selected Poems, which came out in 2006 and which contains selections from The Dog’s Heart, Damages, The Cult of the Right Hand, and from her early chapbook called Toward Morning/Swimmers –as well as about 80 pages of what were then new poems.

I don’t want to do a book review here, nor am I interested in poetry analysis right now. The reason I’m re-reading these poems with care and interest is to endeavor to understand why I appreciate her work so deeply. For one thing, Terranova consistently surprises me, but with quiet surprises. The turns in her poems are seldom the powerful, swift changes of mood, direction, or language that I like in many writers’ work…but they are there, and their subtleties and reflective twists engage me in ways perhaps more lasting. Because I have to think about where the poem chose to go, and how it got there. It’s not merely ambiguity, though sometimes the closure’s ambiguous, it’s because the last lines of Terranova’s poems feel so right to me. They don’t always circle back to an image or idea in the opening–sometimes, they travel quite a distance away.

Ann E. Michael, Re-reading, re-learning

For Rachel Blau Duplessis,

Blue, legion. Drafts. A polyvocal entry. One’s ear, to lend. A visual, daily practice. Days and works and days. Cartographic, the position of collage. This vanishing point. A sure cure, applied. Categories. So necessary, membrane. How big a threat? What, temporality. How grand, this arrangement of stars. Encompassed. The onset, journey. Heart, and blood, and facts. An ocean. The structural divisions of trees, thin lines of fence. How redundant the aesthetic. Leaves tarnish, fall, and then. Thus, exegesis. These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus.

rob mclennan, seven poems from a new project,

“Up//Roar” is the follow up to “Joy//Us Poems of Queer Joy” also published by Arachne. Whereas the latter celebrated, the new anthology encompasses poems for bleaker times, although that’s not to say the poems are bleak or full of doom and gloom, there is a celebration of allyship and resistance. As the introduction points out even in 2026 some families still cannot welcome the spouse/partner of departed loved ones because they’d prefer to erase the departed’s love life. […]

“Up//Roar” brings together a wide range of queer voices, all celebrating resistance and strength gained from being true to oneself however that may to look to other people. It’s a timely reminder that currently there is still discrimination and exclusion faced by LGBTQ+ communities. But here are also glimmers of light within the darkness that come from shared experiences and ways of owning being the outcast. Humans should not be forced to pretend to be something they are not or suppress major parts of themselves to “fit-in”. Let the hyenas not change their spots, “Up//Roar” is a necessary demonstration that hyenas should find their pack and not shiver in isolation.

Emma Lee, “Up//Roar Poems of Queer Resistance” edited by Cherry Potts and Jeremy Dixon (Arachne Press) – book review

The publication of Path means that, at last, the entire body of [Chris] Torrance’s 50-year engagement with The Magic Door is now available. Sort of. Unfortunately, the Test Centre volume is out of print with the occasional copy being sold online at funny-money prices, and the original individual volumes are collectors’ items, rarely surfacing at any price. And even the Test Centre edition excluded The Book of Heat, as it was originally written for performance. The inclusion of performance pieces here (RORI and Frinite) in Path would seem to indicate a change of heart on that front.

The Magic Door/Path is one of the most important long poems in British poetry of the last 50 years, and needs to be available to readers in its entirety. Now that we have the conclusion, we really need a reprint of the full pre-Path text, including The Book of Heat. Meanwhile, I urge you to read this book, whether you are familiar with the earlier parts or not. Torrance is quite simply a vital, important, dare I say major poet. We owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Maillard for keeping his work alive and to Aquifer for publishing this book.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

In an excellent prefatory essay to the Clay Sanskrit Library edition of the Gitagovinda (translated and also introduced by Lee Seigel), Sudipta Kaviraj very neatly summarises what Jayadeva achieves in these songs:

Jayadeva composed in an astonishing form of Sanskrit in which the visible marks of its complex grammar are so minimally used that it became intelligible, almost without residue, to a much wider audience of vernacular readers. Literary skill obliterates the formal boundaries between different natural languages. It is an ironically democratised Sanskrit which can be read and enjoyed by those who do not know it. It is a strange bridge language and it is a text that lies at the crossing and therefore joins the literary world of Sanskrit and of several vernaculars.

I think it’s fair to say that none of the translations I’ve quoted so far really come anywhere close to suggesting this extraordinary blend of tradition and innovation: a newly transparent and accessible style which nevertheless draws upon the long history of kāvya. Recently I received a review copy of Inderjeet Mani’s new version of the Gitagovinda. This is a very different approach to the text, which draws in particular upon a long-standing tradition of understanding the Gitagovinda as a kind of drama. Mani’s version isn’t a close translation at all but I admire the way it incorporates elements from the long tradition of commentary on and performance of the poem into the English text. 

Victoria Moul, Translating and re-translating the Gitagovinda

(Translating Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa)
The three peaks stand like flags piercing the sky.
Forested landscapes hide ponds, and streams
breathe a mist of autumnal clouds.
In the dense undergrowth, oleander petals
sequester light. He pauses, wondering how different
the smell of the earth is—the wild fragrance of long pepper
from coiled creepers. Purple Chironji berries
crunch under his feet, squishy pulp
yeilds crisp kernels his family cherishes.

(From Sarga 2)

I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.

Uma Gowrishankar, What the Land Unfolds

Readers familiar with these reviews will be aware that Indigo Dreams Publishing has established a strong reputation for poetry collections of consistently high quality. Zoe Brooks’s Something in Nothing (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2026) is a particularly compelling addition to its list, and one that is likely to stand among the most significant collections of the year. In this highly original volume, Brooks recontextualises figures from traditional fairy tales within contemporary social and political landscapes, using their familiar narratives to examine brutality, misogyny and the forms of violence that remain embedded within modern society.

One of the central figures in this reworking is Bluebeard, whom Brooks presents as a serial predator targeting vulnerable women. In Bluebeard’s Girls, she writes: ‘The first was a stepdaughter/ that nobody wanted. The second was a girl/ who knew how to give but not to take./ The third was a girl/ arms as wide as Clapham Junction. /The fourth was a girl/ you would step over quickly.’ The women are characterised as isolated and socially marginal, their vulnerability rendering them susceptible to exploitation. Brooks’s use of the phrasing and rhythms of nursery counting rhymes is especially significant: a form conventionally associated with childhood innocence and play is placed in tension with Bluebeard’s predatory violence, producing a chilling effect. At the same time, Brooks resists any tendency to blame the victims. Instead, she exposes the social attitudes that enable their erasure. In Bluebeard Likes to Entertain, these women are described as ‘like puppies/ that need drowning./ The sort of women/ that no one will miss.’

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Something in Nothing’ by Zoe Brooks

Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival is compulsively readable, if overly speculative. I’m glad to learn more about Marlowe’s love life and spy activities. Some of the comparisons between him and Shakespeare are telling. One was so reckless by temperament, the other so cautious. One became a gentleman via university education though from the working class; the other never went to university but managed to buy a title from his theater earnings. Because so little is really known about Marlowe, the book is as much about his contemporaries as him.

In The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England, Nicholas Jenkins makes a convincing case for how the early Auden was preoccupied by the place of national belonging in modern identities. The impact of WWI and its aftermath on young Auden is nicely documented, as is his complicated desire to heal and restore English culture and tradition (Edward Thomas, Hardy, Graves, Owen). Jenkins’s writing is somewhat repetitive. The 537 pages could usefully have been reduced to 400, but the book is a hoard of striking details and insightful criticism of Auden’s major early poems.

Jee Leong Koh, Two Biographies

[Walter Savage] Landor was an interesting figure — a man as definitively out of time as any in English literature: an 18th-century Augustan, come too late to be a peer of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) and Samuel Johnson (1709–1784); a 19th-century political firebrand, come too soon to foment the revolutions he desired. He never quite fit in, and his work was unreinforced by poetic followers and underappreciated by the public. He could not be a Romantic like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and he could not be a Victorian like Tennyson and Browning. The age kept his talent constrained.

One sign of the genuineness of the talent is the fact that other poets have always appreciated his work. Landor preached violence in his political prose, unable to stomach the emerging industrial age. Or, in truth, unable even to understand the new order, which left him flailing in political writings that have not aged well. In his poetry, however, he responded to the industrial remaking of England by finding refuge in a deeply classical verse: typically, short poems on grief and the old virtues, written with a classically serene tone. “Rose Aylmer” is a good example, or “Mild is the Parting Year.”

And then there are the two verses by Landor we look at today: “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” and “Dirce.” A strict cataloger might argue that these are not precisely epigrams but simply brief poems, lacking the teaching element of an adage. Our sense of poetic brevity, however, has been shaped by centuries of epigrams. We read these verses from Landor in an epigrammatical way, and rightly so, as both have the power to stick in memory, which is the first quality necessary for a well-made epigram. And they have the second necessary quality for a satisfying epigram, which snaps closed like a well-made box.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The English Epigram

For Persuasion, I wrote about the recent brouhaha over the Princeton English syllabus. Yes, the syllabus has a lot of socialism, but the real problem, to my rather antiquated mind, is what it doesn’t have. The trend in so many places now is to require English majors to take only a single course pre-1700. So almost everything from Beowulf to Absalom and Achitophel becomes optional.

The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.

You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.

My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.

You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.

And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.

There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.

This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.

This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.

Henry Oliver, My plea to English students.

Before I made the long, agonising (!) move into academia I worked as a court transcript editor in London for nine years. I actually trained as a stenographer, on a Kombu-green antique steno machine which stamped letters onto a roll of paper, like a silent miniature typewriter. Stenotype is machine shorthand; each keystroke completes one syllable of a word. Your left fingers, in combination, produce the beginning consonant, your thumbs the middle vowel sound and the fingers of your right hand the ending consonant. So ‘crossfire’ would be two strokes: ‘K R O S’, then, on the line blow, ‘T P AO EU R’. There aren’t enough keys for one per letter, so ‘tp’ represents the ‘f’ sound, whole ‘AO EU’ is a long ‘i’.

Anyway, I switched to editing transcripts because it meant more money in the short term (far less in the long term, but I hadn’t planned to stay on the job quite as long as I did). As an editor, I worked alongside some of the best stenographers in the world — that is, I literally sat next to them in court — and cleaned up the transcript as it emerged on my computer screen, typing in sections that had been missed due to mumbling or over-speaking (of which there is a lot in UK trials and tribunals), sorting out the spellings of names and specialist terms, and keeping a log of anything we would need to ask about or research in order for the transcript to be as accurate as possible. It was surprisingly gruelling work — often upwards of 200 pages a day — and I permanently damaged the nerves in my arms doing it, because most of the courts and rooms we worked in were not designed with ergonomic seating in mind.

I collected dozens of poems about or inspired by aspects of the cases we covered, and published hardly any of them. There’s one about the usefulness of the en-dash that appeared in Asterism: An Anthology of Poems Inspired by Punctuation, edited by Tiffany Anne Tondut and published by Laudanum Books. And then there’s this, which was published in the first (and, thus far, only) issue of Cambridge Poetry, edited by Dan Leighton — which, by the way, is as comprehensive a snapshot of the current Cambridge poetry scene as you’re likely to find in print.

Like many other poems from that era, it’s about 96% collage. All of the questions are questions which were asked in various court cases, and all of the answers are taken from newspaper reports on accidental fires, with the word ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ substituted in for ‘fire’ and ‘fires’. ‘Cross’ is short for ‘cross-examination’ in lawyer parlance, so ‘Crossfire’ (with an implied colon between the two parts of the word) would mean cross-examination of fire. The plan is to collect these and other court poems up into a little zine at some point. That zine will be part of a series of zines that collect and organise work from the unpublished book I mentioned back in this post from October.

Jon Stone, POEM / Crossfire

Dear poets and friends. Most of you know that I am still “young” by some standards. Last February I turned 42. My husband and I live together with 2 cats, but no kids. We are childless by choice and this has given us a certain level of freedom that some people give up as they age. For example, a few years ago, we sort of spontaneously left our apartment in Los Angeles to go live in Costa Rica for 3 years.

Still, time and family obligations have caught up with us. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time care-taking for my aging parents, helping them make and keep dr. appointments, do their laundry, and trim back some of the trees in their beautifully overgrown front yard.

This has all gotten me thinking about both my relationship with my parents (naturally) and also my own mortality. I always knew that I was going to get older, in theory. . . but now it’s starting to feel real. I could go on about that (and I will in my own poetry-writing), but for now I just want to say that the 2 poems below really hit me where I live lately. I’m extremely grateful to each poet, Amy Small McKinney and Susan Michele Coronel for giving me a kind of language to use to start addressing these issues.

Tresha Faye Haefner, 2 Poems I Needed To Read Today

To be found as a shiny coordinate in the star-chart for lightning bugs on summer nights.

To be found and saved from the searing screech of sirens.

To be found as an escapee from an oracle hushed into tremble.

To be found sleeping in a calm so deep you can hear the trees breathe.

Rich Ferguson, To be found

[T]his week has been somewhat knocked off kilter by having my phone stolen in Shoreditch on Monday night. It’s partially my own fault for being too trusting, but some cheeky fucker ran off with my phone…And I couldn’t catch them. I don’t know what I’d have been able to do even if I’d caught them, so it was perhaps a pointless pursuit.

Not much more i can do, remind me to take out the phone insurance next time, yeah.

Anyhoo, this week has also been buoyed up by reading my copy of Andrew Jamison’s Swans We Cannot See  (You have sighed up for his newsletter, yeah? Go on. I’ll wait, etc). If I had a phone I’d take a picture of the folded over corners of pages for all the poems to come back to..And look, I’ve rattled through the book a bit quicker than usual this week without my phone being present, so perhaps a digital detox is on the cards, but take my word for it..I’ve turned over a lot of corners in this book. […]

Andrew writes movingly about being a parent, a husband, he writes beautifully about place, and to my mind a bit about being/feeling out of place back where you originate from…perhaps it’s displacement??? Perhaps it’s just me. NB You should also check out his epic potato poem in the book.

Mat Riches, A Drunk Octopus Behind The Pink Doors of Perception

[James] Dickey makes two big choices in the title and the first line. As titles go, “Adultery” is anything but subtle, regardless of where you feel it lands in the pantheon of sins. It’s jarring because it’s unexpected as the subject of a poem, especially if you’re not a wide reader. When I’ve taught this poem in the past, students have occasionally asked why write about this. They’re used to less messy love poems, or at least they think those other poems are less messy, but that’s another conversation.

The second big choice Dickey makes is to implicate the reader in the first lines. “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad.” My first thought when reading those lines, even now, is no we haven’t all been in those rooms. It’s the way he’s so casual about assuming that which carries the force for me, the way he reduces this sin of betrayal to something everyone has done, how he’s so matter-of-fact about it before going into this description of the bland, unchallenging cheap hotel room art that’s there mostly to fill space on the walls.

But it’s in that description where we first get to see some sense of guilt, which is the emotion that will drive the rest of this poem.

Brian Spears, “Adultery” by James Dickey

Do you know the long poems of David W. McFadden? I’ve always loved how they ramble, surprised at how they unfold and where they go. How strange, ironic, intelligent, tongue-in-cheek yet profoundly moving they are. They understand affect and composing with connotation, sentiment, form, narrative, beauty, and surprise. Over the last few days, I somehow felt compelled to write this sad poem about two brothers in a horse costume and I was thinking of David’s long poems.

Gary Barwin, Lament for Horse Costume: Tragic Novel in Two Parts

The Ancient Futures issue of Sage Magazine, a print publication from Yale’s School of the Environment, recently arrived in the mail as a beautiful, stitched book containing my poem, ‘The Woolly Kind,’ following an open call last autumn. The unique formatting in the pages below was done by the graduate students on the magazine’s design team. It’s a bit hard to read on screen, so I’ll include a plain text version at the end.

I wrote this persona poem several years ago after Colossal Biosciences announced it was planning to bring the Woolly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), back from extinction by 2028. In August, the company revised its timeframe, stating it might take until the 2030s. My poem imagines life from the perspective of this future creature.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Ancient Futures, Recent News

My bottle of ‘Glimmers’ pills came the other day and I was truly filled with joy at the sight of this little prescription with its contents of glimmering moments. What an honour to be one of the 26 poets selected to feature in this small but powerful collection.

Each morning for the past week I’ve been tipping out one at random and every single one has been a gorgeous gem (and a super way to start the day!). You can get hold of a bottle of ‘Glimmers’ through The Poetry Pharmacy’s website Here.

And if you’d like to have a little peak at some of the poems you can find out more about the project and read some editors picks in The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press’ Newsletter.

Here’s my Glimmer

Branches raise fingers to sky—ask for a blessing of leaves;
ground is still wet with winter, sun rests her hands on my
shoulders, and a warbler hymns from the silver birch. Dear
Spring: eat me, swallow me whole, a seed into moist earth.

Rachael Hill, A Glimmer

The poems in “The Basement Stacks” have been about memory from the beginning of the series. An image or phrasing or action from one poem leads to the next piece, and so on. Part 10 helped me as a writer make some discoveries about myself, or at least remember things I’d forgotten. Writing, in any form, can have that wonderful outcome.

This new poem grew from my thoughts about the boxes in the stairwell in part 10. In the new piece I was following the imagery as I’ve done with all the pieces. There are many possibilites with each poem that could lead to any number of new pieces, but my process is to follow the first moment in a poem that speaks to me in a direct way, and the next poem find its own way.

“The Basement Stacks” is projected as one section of a manuscript in progress, tentatively titled “Portraits”. That’s an extremely uncreative title, but it does, in its own way, reveal clearly the subject matter of its pages. In the series and ms, most imagery and action originate in reality, but some have worked their way into the pieces by necessity, by a kinship to or a reflection of the truth. Even those few parts that are fictional are connected to the truth in some way. And here I’m thinking of Albert Camus: “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 11”

Tradition offers explanations for why this piece of Torah is written in this way. To me what’s striking is the visual prosody — the way the shape of the poem sings a particular kind of song in my consciousness. The open space gives each line a caesura, a pause. I read the words differently, and feel them differently, because of the space between them. So that’s how I wrote this week’s poem: with pauses in each line. More white space / white fire, imbued with silent meaning, holding the words’ black fire.

This one’s kind of in the same vein as the poems in Texts to the Holy (Ben Yehuda). When I shared my new year’s poem just before Rosh Hashanah, my friend Mary Ann — who has known me since we were in seventh grade — said, “You always could write a hell of a love poem.” The older we get, the more (I think) we become ourselves. It’s funny, and sweet, and a little poignant, for me to see reflected in her eyes the fact that this isn’t new. This is how I am, maybe even more so in my 50s than I was before.

Rachel Barenblat, For Ha’azinu

‘John Rae and the Northern Telegraph’ was part visitation, part rethinking of his expedition. Music was commissioned from Scottish composers Stuart MacRae and Ailie Robertson, Eli Tausen á Lava from the Faroe Islands, and Arnanguaq Gerstrøm from Greenland. We worked independently and were given an open brief. Stuart MacRae considered the conflicting thoughts that might have filled Rae’s mind, a bit older now, leaving his new wife. ‘I imagine the form of the music as a line of communication,’ he said; ‘one idea suggesting another, passing on its energy to a different musical expression, in one direction, always transforming but never returning to the source.’ Ailie Robertson intertwined the ends of the route in a back-and-forth of laments and melodies based on Greenlandic beaded yokes. Arnanguaq Gerstrøm structured her piece around the breathing patterns and ornamented tones of traditional singers, with the mechanical pulse of the telegraph’s clicks and codes rising and fading like static. To prepare to compose, Eli Tausen á Lava walked the Faroese section of the proposed route, south to north. John Rae walked many thousands of miles on foot and in snow shoes : ‘Through this cold, unromantic labour, there comes some kind of understanding of the world’. Eli’s piece became a contemporary meditation on pilgrimage, of undergoing a hard physical journey in order to bring on an inner transformation.

In his substack last week, Don [Paterson] talked about the process of collaboration, in all its nitty gritties: ‘Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air’. On the night of the performance, yes: the poems, at a practical level, created distance, carrying the audience from one deep auditory reverie into the next. In these beautiful pieces I heard skeins of geese and the rattle of swans’ wings, foot crunch, threads of singing, odd strings of Morse. All art aspires to the condition of music, said Walter Pater: there is an immediate intuition of (some kind of) meaning, an immediate impact on the emotions. In between, the words, gleaned from real people and real places, pinned us back to our place on the planet : here, in these north islands, in this old kirk, watching the weather coming. ‘It seems to me,’ said Mann’s Dr Faustus, ‘that despite the logical, moral rigor music may appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits … I am devoted to it with all my heart’.

But something else happened too. In the St Magnus Cathedral, this continual transformation that Stuart described was vivid, almost tactile. Music in a mediaeval Romanesque/Gothic cathedral was intended to overwhelm, in the best sense of the word. The building’s internal proportions – the high, tiny windows, the placing of its columns, galleries and vaults – were intended to amplify unaccompanied voices, and create a rolling sound that would wash through its spaces like waves in the sea. Standing in the transept below the high central tower, it was as if we were placing the words and music into the air, letting them swell and breathe on their own.

Lesley Harrison, The Northern Telegraph

As part of the UEA Welcome activities last week, I led a “Word Walk” around campus, where we stopped to consider the roots and history of nouns we encountered, guided by Emerson’s observation that “Language is fossil poetry”. The walk zig-zagged interdisciplinarily between architecture (“concrete”), natural history (“butterfly”, “birch”), maths (“extrapolation”), and chemistry (“gas”, “helium”), before ending up at art history, with an Ancient Egyptian carved figurine of a frog in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.

Looking up the etymology of “frog” in the Oxford English Dictionary, I learned a new word: “hypocoristic”.

Ultimately related to Old English frosc and its cognates in other Germanic languages, although the nature of the relationship is uncertain; the present word was probably originally an alteration of frosc as a result of association with docga dog n.1 […] in which the geminate consonant perhaps originally had a hypocoristic motivation (< Greek ὑποκόρισμα, ‑κορισμός pet-name, < ὑποκορίζεσθαι to play the child, use terms of endearment)

The OED entry on the mysterious origins of “dog” is a lesson in philology itself. What I understand from the above, though, is that the written words “frogge” and “dogge” (the vowel-shortening double “g” is the “geminate consonant”) began as spoken terms, for which the “hypocoristic motivation” was that of the pet name: the playful diminutive applied to the familiar creature. And “frog” perhaps — though this is my own speculation — was an association formed through the rhyme it makes with “dog”.

For Gertrude Stein, this is the felt life of language and naming that eventually becomes formalised as poetry. In her essay “Poetry and Grammar”, she writes:

Think of how you talk to anything whose name is new to you a lover a baby or a dog or a new land or any part of it. Do you not inevitably repeat what you call out and is that calling out not of necessity in short lines. Think about it and you will see what I mean by what you feel.

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything.

That’s not exactly how I put it below, in 2005. But it arrives at the same idea via a different route: that to read poetry, you start with the words, and listen for the feeling. To quote the epigraph from Nijinsky’s diary that begins “Friends”, the John Ashbery poem that I discuss here: “I like to speak in rhymes, because I am a rhyme myself.”

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Frog and Dog

I’m editing, editing. What could I do for break? I know…word games. There’s re-w-or-d-a-ble. (Not a sponsorship endorsement but word geek fun.) What else?

What do I like? Let’s see, poetry, remixing, chance operations, corpus studies, Good Omens and making stuff.

I have 5 sets of magnetic poetry. What if I made a Good Omens one? Which words are keyword bingo troped? I brainstormed some.

I have a base set, a gardening set, a CanLit set, a French base set, and some yellowed ones that I’m not sure what they were from. One of the sets came with blanks. And I have a labelmaker. We have a plan. 

So I made a thing. 

Pearl Pirie, Good Omens Magnetic Poetry

On the evening of the day we move I have to teach a step class and Nick has to take a choir rehearsal. So no putting our feet up that evening!  Then waking up the next day, clambering over boxes and hoping the boiler/shower/hob are all working…. wish us luck!

Obviously I don’t have a lot of time to noodle around on the blog. But I did want to mention these literary hoaxes that are doing the rounds. Maybe I’ve come late to this particular party. A few months ago I got an email from someone claiming to have read ‘The Golden Rules of Blogging’ and asking if I was up for any other projects with the publishing house she claimed to represent. I confess I fell for it rather stupidly – I looked up the sender on LinkedIn and she appeared to have a legitimate profile there, but I did think it very odd for her to pick up on a book that’s over ten years old. So I replied, albeit in a cagey manner. That’s when the penny dropped – another gushy email came back right away, and I recognised the purple prose of a crude AI bot. I’m happy to say I’m not the first to fall for it – for example here’s Julie Broad of Book Launchers telling her story. 

A week or so later came another similar email, this time allegedly from a professor at a West Country university who claimed he ran a literary festival and would be honoured to have me featured there! Woohoo! Except the ‘festival’ was starting the very next week, and the professor turned out to be a real person, but actually a professor of engineering. Since then the emails have arrived on a regular basis. It’s the present-day version of those misspelt email scams from twenty years ago. 

Robin Houghton, New beginnings and literary hoaxes

For the uninitiated, here is a quick overview of how publishing a book of poetry works:

Most poets don’t have agents (unless you are Billy Collins or James Franco and already important OR independently wealthy). The vast majority of poetry books are published via Book-Length Contests or Open Reading Periods, and even the biggest poetry press is typically a small indie or university press with only a few people running it and even less money keeping it afloat. Sending in your manuscript may happen in April, with nothing but crickets until Christmas, and the contests aren’t free – most charge $25, with the most expensive running around $35.

What do you get if you win? Maybe a $1000 prize, a few poetry readings, or free copies of the book, distribution to some indie bookstores, some universities inviting you to come give a reading.

No one will stop you on the street for an autograph – even the most famous living poet is not famous outside of poetry circles, and likely your book will be forgotten in a month or, worse, never even heard of. Ever.

Yet, the competition is steep – which makes me love Poets all the more. We are such a ridiculous, starry-eyed set! […]

The numbers can seem daunting, but, as I let my fourth-collection drift around the contest circuit, what all this tells me is that one rejection means basically nothing, that I need to be sending more places, and that I must persist.

Those numbers also remind me that every poetry book I adore came from the efforts of a poet who kept sending out their work despite the tiny odds and minuscule rewards because they believed their poems needed to find their readers.

Renee Emerson, Poetry Manuscript Contests

I remain the sort of poet who doesn’t get asked to do paid gigs, has never been published in reputable literary journals and has no book deal, but now I am the sort of poet who is resigned to that fate, and is enjoying a presence on the internet, and occasional publication in fabulous mags and websites that admittedly might not be quite as reputable as the New Yorker or the London Review of Books. As a consequence of that resignation, I am a lot less worried about reading at open mics. Don’t get me wrong, I still want to get up from time to time, and I still want to make an impact on the occasions when I do. But I have developed some strategies to avoid getting my knickers in a twist about it. Sometimes they actually work. I am not suggesting that they would work for anyone else. But they help me. Here they are.

One. I try hard not to care about how my reading will be received. I’m not going to put myself into that position of worry. When it’s my turn to read, I’m going to get up, say a few words, read my piece and get off.

Two. I’m going to do one, and only one poem, no haggling over a second, third or (God forbid) a forth one. I’ll save those for the rare occasions when I am actually asked to do a set. People haven’t come to see me at an open mic – I should have a bit of humility.

Three. When I am done, I should sit down, still my beating heart and do my best to forget about it. I can save the in depth analysis with Gary Lineker and Ian Wright for when I get home.

Four. I try to listen properly to the other readers. Not using them as yardsticks to compare myself to, but for who they are.

If you are a poet who regularly attends open mics, perhaps you do all of these things naturally. Perhaps you have always approached open mic in this manner. If so, I salute you. It’s hard work for a big headed egotist like myself to cultivate such an attitude. There is also the attendant worry of appearing arrogant, as if open mics are “beneath me” if I don’t get up, or appear too flippant when I do. Perhaps I overthink everything, but I don’t think that I am alone in such mental struggles.

Mike O’Brien, How to Enjoy a Poetry Open Mic

We read our work at the open mics, and this past Saturday I shared “Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan” for the first time. I didn’t realize how well it would play to a live audience, and I think it may become part of my memorized rotation for readings. After the event, Midge Goldberg and I were trying to describe to Tom the Aussie the tradition of singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” in the middle of 8th innings at Fenway Park.

I remember workshopping this poem during my residency, and someone complained about how many baseball references there were. Now that I’ve read it out loud I think I have regrets about not mentioning something about my mother bringing us home. I see a revision in the future! Good idea? Bad idea? Please be opinionated in comments.

I’ve pulled the poem out of the drawer every so often for over the past year, but 2026 is the 20th anniversary of my father’s death and September would have been my parents’ 53rd wedding anniversary. I decided that it was a good time to fly it out to journals, and it landed on the very first try.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Karaoke for the Die-Hard Fan

The bookshops that impress me have “Short stories” sections. They’re mostly in Dublin, though the Amnesty International shop in Cambridge and Saffron Walden’s Oxfam shop have story sections. The Oxfam bookshop in Islington doesn’t have one, though it has a section for “Literary Magazines” – Acumen, Pennine Platform, etc.

Blackwells in Oxford has a “poetry pamphlets” section.

“Poetry” shelves often have an “Anthologies” section. The Islington bookshop has that, and also has a section I’ve never seen before – “Contemporary Poetry” – which includes pamphlets and many slim volumes. It makes sense to display the spineless pamphlets in boxes – it makes browsing easier, like fingering through LPs in the olden days.

Tim Love, Bookshops – specialist shelves

The CBe edition of Testimony by Charles Reznikoff, all 608 pages of it, has gone to print. A longish piece by me on Reznikoff will be in the imminent new issue of The Little Review (£5 for 176 pages: ridiculously good value). For a reading of the whole of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London next spring I applied last June for funding (for costs including gallery hire, video-recording, etc.), and I learned this week I didn’t get it. I spent a long time over that application; it was a beautiful application. But the reading will happen.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter September 2026

The neighborhood paper, which has little to report beyond the struggles of the city council, school board, and high school sports teams, informs us of an upcoming event: a tour of the city’s fanciest houses, built by men of wealth and ambition at the turn of the previous century. Why we tour such places—to gawk, to lust, to covet—is a mystery I’ve contemplated more than once. Here is one such contemplation.

[…]

Guidebooks lapse into silence on the sins
that undergird their granite disciplines:

the dark red sandstone brooding on the hill
over the history of a steel-spiked will
that built and built and never had enough—
a public treasure now, it rules the bluff
and makes us marvel at our rush to own
the memory of the men it turned to stone.

Which we preserve, the robber baron’s guilt
being gilded by the loveliness he built.
As for a feast day, every year we come
to hear the engines of our envy hum,
sighing for beauties, knowing what they meant.
Not quite complicit. Not quite innocent.

Maryann Corbett, “to hear the engines of our envy hum . . .”

Had you heard of “the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” when you were eleven? I had not. I’m not even sure I had heard of Keats. My main poetry experience was Pam Ayres’ “I wish I’d looked after my teeth” (which I still think is wonderful, whatever the poetry overlords say) and a smattering of Patience Strong. My old and very posh art teacher was astonished at my ignorance. The memory of her astonishment pops into my head as autumn tiptoes in. Light recedes day by day, the air I breathe when I let the cat out (and in and out and in) in the morning has a faint chill, the smells change from sun warmed jasmine and barbecues to damp leaves and bonfires. Mists begin to wrap the morning, and supermarkets proclaim the arrival of “British season apples” which implies mellow fruitfulness exists somewhere. I’ll miss the light of summer but autumn brings the gift of time. The garden takes less attention, people stop having barbecues and other social excitements, trips out are replaced by staying in and watching Ludwig. More than anything, it brings me the time and energy to write. If you’re familiar with Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory you’ll know exactly what I mean. […]

Poetry has slipped to one side for a while. I’ve a new Poetry School course starting soon which I know will spark the poetic light again, but overall I’ve found I’m just not as excited as I was. I’ve reached a point of stasis. The giddy excitement of being selected to be one of Nine Arches Press Dynamo poets, learning that I could have work published and actually seeing my words and name in print has moved to one side. I’ve reached all the goals I set myself way back in 2018. I’m published in magazines including my goal of goals which was to be in Under the Radar. I’ve published two books, entered and been shortlisted for various prizes and I’m not sure where poetry will take me next. I’m not putting poetry aside forever; notes are still being made, the mysteries of the sestina still thrill and baffle me and I’m still writing poetry for wedding readings, which brings a joy all of its own.

As well as travel writing I’m dipping back into short fiction. I love creating worlds inspired by a photograph or picture (old postcards are especially exciting) and am acutely aware of the place all those poetry skills have in creating them. It’s a genre I haven’t worked in since my first forays (back) into creative writing and I’m hoping the quiet months of autumn and winter mean I’ll have time and energy to rejuvenate my skills.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Shine the sun and rain the rain

When I have seen jays before I have often caught of a glimpse of them as they have flown across short spaces within forest areas and I have always felt lucky to catch this rare flash of their distinct feathers. The one this week, in my own garden, caught my attention as I was settling to work at my laptop. On being observed it flew from the wall and thudded to a stop on the roof above me. I went outside to take a closer look, but it had already moved on by the time I got outside. The ginger cat had been watching me one night as I was unloading the tumble dryer in the back porch. I felt that wonderful sense of being lifted from my own world because I was being observed in a kind and curious way. And there studying me was the lovely solid looking cat that has recently been sleeping in a sheltered spot in our garden. We blinked at each other and then, as I smiled at the thought of being noticed whilst doing a boring but necessary job, off he went.

I am sort of making a note to self to notice more things on my daily walk and this brings to mind the fact that it feels like a solid fitness thing to do at this time of year when compared to the lightness of taking the same walk in spring when the daffodils are emerging. Photos at this time of year also seem to be of solid things like tree trunks against the sky or cows so maybe I will look for the light as I stroll out and see where it is that I find it in this new Autumn. I know it was in the sunrise and sunset of Saturday into Sunday, and I know those two studied views gladdened my heart.

Sue Finch, GLANCES, GLIMPSES AND OBSERVATIONS

This is our life, made of small
moments. Hearing the call

of a bird, resonant
as a bell, longing

and desire become
indistinguishable.

Luisa A. Igloria, Occasional

“I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” This was Annie Dillard quoting Vincent Van Gogh. Even though VVG said it, I’ll always connect the quotation to her. The way that a person looking at the intricate beauty of the world and interpreting it in the way only they can, is also an act of heartbreak. And for credibility’s sake, there is always bad news right beside the news of the beauty of the world. Thus heartbreak. Thus utterly.

Shawna Lemay, Because it is September

I had just been talking to a friend about how our social habits changed during the pandemic, and how I was so much less social than I used to be. Well not this week! Besides visiting with my farmer friends at the various pumpkin farms, we also had our Bookwalter’s Wine and Book Club, where we discussed Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. People were really taken by it, and I noticed this time around (I hadn’t re-read in a little while) the huge Bowie connection in the poems, and listened to the songs that were referenced. I was aware of Bowie as a kid but I think I mostly remember a couple of his later songs, but of course my main crush was Prince, who wasn’t quite as interested in space. Then the next day we had our poetry group, which was wonderful as usual and we talked about submission opportunities and shared poems and Glenn’s gluten-free red pepper and goat cheese pizza, and pumpkin cheesecake, and I ate more than my share of Witch’s Finger grapes (another seasonal favorite! And we’re even coordinating a pumpkin farm visit and maybe movie get-together. After being so sick back in 2016-17 and then the pandemic, this feels more like my life used to be. Did I mention I have updated my resume and will be job hunting as well?

Good News to Share…Soon

Do you hate when people in the writing world tease good news they can’t share? Me too. That’s why I’m definitely not saying that I got good news that I can share soon, and I have to say that after a period of discouragement with the poetry world, it’s nice to have a little good news in a while, right?

I’ve also been writing more poems and sending out more work. That’s September’s magic – unwrapping new pens, setting up new spreadsheets, a little more motivation to keep going, especially on the days when it’s in the sixties and sunny and the hummingbirds are still busy at the last burst of September blooms.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Fall! And How Many Pumpkin Farms, Social Week, and Good News to Come!

糸瓜忌の紅茶に消ゆる角砂糖　秋元不死男

hechima-ki no kōcha ni kiyuru kakuzatō

            Shiki’s Death Day
            a lump of sugar disappears
            into tea

                                    Fujio Akimoto

from Haiku Dai-Saijiki (Comprehensive Haiku Saijiki), Kadokawa Shoten, Tokyo, 2006

Fay’s Note: Fujio Akimoto (1901-1977). Shiki Masaoka (b 1867) died on September 19, 1902.  Because his death haiku was about ‘hechima (gourd),” his death anniversary is called “hechima-ki.”

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 19, 2026)

The poet called this morning. My electricity had just gone out and I was plotting my next move in the dark. “Is it a good time to speak?” he said. I ran through a quick itinerary of pressing issues in my head with a rotating leaderboard of the top three items that consisted of: crippling existential loneliness, Chelsea Football Club’s current defensive frailty, whether rhyming ‘apothecary’ with ‘apology’ in a poem I’ve made about Keats was absolutely necessary or just plain clunky.

The poet was waiting for an answer.

“Sure,” I said as my phone pinged a notification from my bank. I’d exceeded my overdraft limit. Again. “It’s a great time,” I said.

I put the poet on loudspeaker and used my phone’s screen to light up the electric meter, to see if I had any emergency credit left. I didn’t. I gave the junction box a gentle tap, the analogue approach, hopeful I may nudge the circuitry back into action. Short of resorting to a hammer or a high kick, blending a lightness of touch with a belief in magic has never yet produced satisfactory results in terms of getting the power back on but this is not to say it wouldn’t work this time. I am not conducting the same experiment expecting different results, I am manifesting forces known only to the practitioners of poetry where subtle fluctuations are at play, creative oscillations that can produce unusual conclusions. We may sit at our desks at the same time of day, open the same note book, use the same pen, the same ink, the same laptop and software but different poems will appear. The outcome is always unique.

I reach out, focus, make a connection, I might, just might, channel enough energy to transfer some Wattage through my fingers and feed the supply. I feel alive. I summon my inner electricity. The spirit of Walt Whitman is here, with me, in a damp subterranean flat in Hackney. But I am all volt and no current. The lights do not come back on. I remain in the dark.

“What’s happening?” I ask the poet, “Talk to me.”

Jan Noble, N°82 How Swan made it to San Francisco

This week: a heady mix of scents, the spaces between pains, shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals, and much more. Enjoy.

The grass has sprung back into shape after plenty of rain and it seems strange to be needing to be cutting it after weeks of watching it turn yellow (and rather crispy) and not need much attention. Pleasingly its flourishing green renewal has renewed my energy for gardening, and I have thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air. I have also enjoyed the scents I have carried with me on my skin as a result of doing some cutting back and weeding. On the first day I smelt of rosemary, on the second lavender, and finally blackcurrants. A heady mix of scents.

I have often been found at my desk this past week squeezing in some extra writing time for the Tea Towel Poems. Those that have been out in the world have received feedback from their recipients, and for those yet to reach a couple celebrating their anniversary I have invited my lovely wife into poetry corner to listen to my drafts. She is good at giving me a succinct and honest reaction and can easily alert me when something I have written only really makes sense in my head. At one point I realised that I could make the necessary tweaks by changing the title of a particular poem. And Kath’s response to the fact it might mean the poem had a long title? “It can’t be any longer than that one about drawers!” Reader, there are drawers in the title of that poem but it’s not just about drawers!

Sue Finch, MARGARINE TUBS OF MARBLES AND ERASERS

秋晴や行きたきところとてもなく　片山由美子

akibare ya yukitaki tokoro totemo naku

            autumn clear sky−
            no particular place
            I would like to go

                                                Yumiko Katayama    

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), October 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (September 13, 2026)

Temperatures are cooling, but most of our days still have the blue clarity that brings people outdoors, the ideal weather for yard and garage sales. There are lots of them in this mixed neighborhood of homeowners and student renters. I’ve always had conflicting feelings about these sales; to me they signify endings or passages. To others, though, they connote neighborly conviviality. […]

What germ of evil in our past
infected this computer’s sheath,
once beige, now with a yellowish cast
like rotten teeth?

The screw loose and the weak-linked chain:
Nothing in literature or art
so bluntly explicates the line
Things fall apart….

They lie there derelict, unhaggled,
wasted, remaindered, on the skids,
redemptionless. But now a gaggle
of college kids

has blown in on a gale of laughter,
talking trash. May youth forgive
the faults age will no longer suffer!
May these bones live.

Maryann Corbett, Yard Sale Weather

I found my most beloved prose writer, Marguerite Duras. Just saying that feels as though I am a child and my favorite color is blue, or yellow. She is every color. If you know Duras, you know her work and life are things of pain, truly. And also immense passion, contradiction, expression. A constant looking back at childhood, at what is no longer, at the mother wound, the father wound. She told me early on that The Wound is the thing to be obsessed over, stoked, and alchemized. Abandonment, family dysfunction, alcoholism, douleur; these things pervaded her inner world, and she chased them on the page.

I did not expect this, but standing at her tomb, I felt a tenderness toward this woman I have never met and could never truly know. I suppose I wanted to see her grave to ask if she is alright, and to also be tended to by her as a woman and as a writer.

As I moved through the glittering carousel energy of Paris, I imagine her in these streets with her contemporaries, at cafes and bars, creating beauty while she moved through her own shadow. I asked her to bless me.

And then I went to César Vallejo, whose grave is tucked into a row. It is easy to miss, even with directions. Vallejo is the reason I ‘became’ a poet—not just dabbled in it. A friend of mine in college, Lisa, gave me a translated copy of his book Spain Take This Chalice From Me (note: there are other translatons of this title). It became my heart because he taught me the heart of poetry could be difficult, could be violent, could be wild and surreal.

His avant-garde tendencies (he even used automatic writing) and darkness showed me new doorways, new permissions. I was young and didn’t understand the politics of his world then, but I knew the language had a ferocity that could contain and express human suffering. He is the reason I love bold language, strangeness, fucked up syntax, the visceral, the embracing of the ugly and warped and broken. Seeing him moved me deeply. I thanked him profusely. I asked him to bless me.

Lisa Marie Basile, Literary ghosts of Montparnasse cemetery

I am absolutely delighted to share “’To Bear Witness to One’s Own Life’: A Conversation Between Hyejung Kook and Mia Ayumi Malhotra,” published in Poetry Northwest online! I only knew Mia slightly when I agreed to interview her about her latest collection, MOTHERSALT (Alice James Books, 2025), but now, after going back and forth for many months, I feel lucky to have gotten to know her and her work much more deeply. […]

I’m still a year out from my book release, but this feels like a pre-debut of my debut. It’s difficult to concisely sum up a book, but here’s my current attempt: ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH is a collection haunted not only by loss—death and miscarriage most prominently—but also by the tender details of the world, peonies reemerging in spring, the taste of salt licked from your palm, the music of overlapping voices and languages.

Hyejung Kook [no title]

As I enter this new phase in the memoir project, I’m facing a fork in the road, and both roads give me agita. First, I’m spilling my tea to anyone who reads the book. But also, I have to figure out how to get people to read the book. It’s hide-and-seek. I’ve been hiding my whole life, and now I want to be sought after.

The count down to publication of I’ll Look for You at Moonrise, is now 9 months away: a full gestation. Due in Pride month.

Right now, I’m working with editors who want me to inject more feeling into some of the adverse events in the story. (Again, please. This time with feeling!)

But here’s the thing . . .

. . . there is some potentially upsetting material in this story, no lie. We even talked about content warnings, which I am not a fan of. Warnings weren’t a “thing” when my stories unfolded, mostly in the 60s and 70s. The truth is I didn’t know that the awful things that happened to me were awful. If you are a woman who lived through those decades, you know exactly what I mean.

Risa Denenberg, Changing Focus

Back in the mists of the 2000s, the GCSE poetry paper for our exam board had a section that asked students to compare a selection of poems from two set poets. You got to choose Duffy and Armitage, or Heaney and Clarke. This was the anthology that made headlines in 2008, when the government decided that the rising tide of knife crime in the UK must be due to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Education for Leisure, and removed it from the syllabus. Remember that? (Macbeth was absolutely fine though.) Anyway, that didn’t affect me because I was the only one in my department at the time who wanted to teach Heaney and Clarke. It was a perfect pairing. I had a lovely time teaching that syllabus. The students, who ended up spending great chunks of their exam time flipping back and forth through an unwieldy booklet of poems, not so much. But they didn’t hate Heaney, at least. And that’s how I got to know his famous, glorious, 1966 debut (debut!!! IMAGINE!!!) collection Death of a Naturalist. I could have taught those poems until the end of my days and never, ever got sick of them. […]

Throughout Death of a Naturalist, we are shown a childhood and a history that is ended, an innocence that can’t last, an anxious step into adulthood and the future. What steadies it in the end is memory, and love, and poetry. In the last poem of the collection, Personal Helicon, Heaney tells us ‘as child, they could not keep me from wells’ and ends by explaining that, because staring into wells is ‘beneath all adult dignity [.] I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.’ It’s the best definition of poetry I know.

Nia Broomhall, Week 26: Death of a Naturalist

a rat will rearrange things:
loaf of bread
now by the back door,
candlesticks tipped over,
cupcake in the sink.
you with a boy inside
sprawl in a soft chair
counting the spaces between pains
while it cowers behind the washer.
we’ll get him later you call
lovingly between contractions,
your husband on his knees
with a knife […]

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Labor Day

I was delighted to find that fellow poet, Neil Leadbeater, had brought out another collection, shared this time with Lori Levy (interviewed by Neil here). The very title, Flavours, conjures up a lavish spread of glorious food for the reader’s enjoyment; who could fail to be drawn in by those zesty lemons that adorn the cover, painted in acrylics by Katie Bayer?

The first half is given over to Lori’s poems under the intriguing heading, ‘Lemons, Eggplants and Chocolate Chip Cookies’. Neil’s poems follow under the heading, ‘The Fruits of Our Labour’ (Psalm 128:2 comes to mind). The final section contains ‘Dialogue Poems’ which unfold in a poetic conversation between the two poets, with Lori’s words on each verso and Neil’s poems of response on the opposite recto. 

The Contents page alone is enough to set one’s mouth watering, with its mention of ‘Peach’, ‘Pomelo’, ‘Pistachio’ and ‘Olives’. Perhaps somewhat unusually for poets today, Lori and Neil have not shied away from the inclusion of humour, an ingredient (sorry…) that enhances these beautifully crafted texts and brings a wry smile to my face. To humour we can add a compelling sense of playfulness, an aspect that is particularly appreciated in these difficult times.

Caroline Gill, Poetry Book Review: ‘Flavours’ by Lori Levy and Neil Leadbeater

Hedgerow of Voices, Paul Brookes, Jane’s Studio Press, 2026, ISBN:‎ 978-1068432378, €6.94 (There’s an email contact on the publisher’s About & Contact page)

In Your Mouth, Paul Brookes, Culture Matters, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-918132-02-1, £10

The Drey Skin, Paul Brookes, The Red Ceilings Press, 2026, £10

Paul Brookes is something of a polymath: poet, shop worker, interviewer and editor of, amongst other things, The Starbeck Orion. But it is his work as a poet that is of interest to us here, with these three new publications all out this year, but with a span of half a decade or more behind them, each one different but with overlapping formal and thematic threads woven through them. I’m reading through them in the order they came through the letterbox, but you could start and end with any of them, really.

Hedgerow of Voices consists of four sets of individually titled sonnets (with one outlier): ‘On River Dove’, ‘Old Moor’, ‘Hedgerow of Voices’ and ‘On North Star’. The first and third are linked sonnets by virtue of the last line of one being the first line of the next.

‘Woolley’, the second poem in ‘On River Dove’, opens with these lines:

Daced and Barbeled, swirls and ripples, rivered.
Cuts through an ancient sandstone riverbed
Ripples fossilised. Earth remembered
lost river. Water’s higher speeds thread

velocities sand grains roll, ripples
form, move with the flow, have short, steep downstream
sides.

The twisting, turning syntax enacts the fish-swim through space and geological time while the linking last/first lines pull us along. And the twists and turns move us from the deep geological past to the Anthropocene present with the closing couplet of the sequence:

A hungry AI data centre feeds,
sups my future till there is no more me.

‘Old Moor’ moves us to another part of the landscape, and also to another part of Brookes’ range, as the final poem in the sequence, also called ‘Old Moor’, moves away from the constraints of the sonnet form and finds its own verbal music:

In hush of sorting sidings,
A dance begins – Lapwing shadows shunters
each wagon, each bird, searches place,
pushed gently over the Hump,
A rise no steeper than a banked field
where Redshank pick through pools.

In ‘Hedgerow of Voices’, the linking again leads us through the weave of the hedge, a site teeming with life, feeding, breeding and renewing itself.

Billy Mills, Three by Paul Brookes: A Review

Béatrice Douvre was a French poet who died, aged only 27, in 1994. Although she published a few poems in magazines during her lifetime, the great bulk of the Collected Poems are drawn from unpublished material found in her papers after her premature death. The earliest of these poems date from 1986, when she was 19; the last of them were written just a few days before she died. In French, her Oeuvre poétique has been available since 2000; this is the first complete translation into English.

This substantial paperback edition, running to over 500 pages in a large format, prints the French verse and English translations (by John Taylor) on facing pages. The book also includes the translation of a brief preface by Philippe Jaccottet, written originally for the French edition. Jaccottet, who died in 2021, was a Swiss poet, translator and critic whose poetry and essays are still ubiquitous in the poetry section of even the smallest French bookshop; several of Douvre’s poems are dedicated to him. This gives you a sense of the extent to which her poetry was embraced and endorsed by the French poetry ‘establishment’. In his excellent introduction on ‘Translating Béatrice Douvre’, Taylor says her work has a ‘mesmerizing lyric élan’, while the publisher of the collected poems in French called her ‘a meteor avid for the absolute’.

Both these descriptions point to the signature intensity of Douvre’s lyric voice. The typical Douvre poem is short – less than a page long, and sometimes only a few lines; light on punctuation; musical without following any specific formal scheme; precise in its evocation of emotion (emotion more than particular recognizable experiences); surprising in its diction; and systematically slightly surreal – surreal, I mean, in its unexpected use of words, but also in its unusual angle of perception and a kind of hyper-focus on the minutiae of observation and response. This intensity of focus creates ultimately a sort of distance from experience as well as an intensifying of it.

Douvre’s use of language is frequently exhilarating. Here is Douvre’s original and Taylor’s version of the first half of the poem ‘L’outrepassante’ (‘She Who Goes Beyond’), dedicated to the poet René Char. The title of the volume, Inhabit the Brief Halt, is taken from the first line:

Habiter la halte brève
La rive avant la traverse
La distance fascinée qui saigne
Et la pierre verte à l’anse des ponts

Dans la nuit sans fin du splendide amour
Porter sur l’ombre et la détruire
Nos voix de lave soudain belliqueuses
L’amont tremble de nos tenailles

Inhabit the brief halt
The shore before the crossing
The fascinated distance that bleeds
And the green stone at the arch of bridges

In the endless night of splendid love
Bring onto the shadow and destroy it
Our lava voices, suddenly warlike,
The upstream tremulous with our pincers

Here we have several examples of Taylor’s great strengths as a translator and also the choices and compromises involved in any such translation. ‘Inhabit the brief halt’ is a wonderful translation for Habiter la halte brève, with just the right edge of peremptory strangeness. ‘Halt’ is also, of course, the most obvious translation of halte because it is etymologically the same word. Taylor quite often chooses the etymologically closest option, even when it is not the closest in everyday meaning. ‘Halt’ exists in French and English alike as both a verb (often a command: “Halt!’) and a noun, but in English the noun ‘halt’ is much rarer than the French equivalent. Halte remains a fairly common word for a pause or break in French; a halte-garderie, for example, is the standard term for a common kind of part-time crèche. We might notice something similar about ‘fascinated’ (fascinée) and ‘splendid’ (splendide): in both cases, the English word has a slightly different or narrower range of uses in everyday speech and a somewhat different tone or register than the French equivalent. In all three of these instances, the English translation arguably makes the line a little stranger even than it is in the original.

I think Taylor does this on purpose to create a sense of dislocation and disorientation. This reminds us that we are reading a translation and encourages us – if we can – to refer to the original, but it is also a translation strategy specific to, and appropriate for, this particular poet. Almost every one of Douvre’s extant poems suggest an experience of the world so intense and minute that it feels like a kind of dislocation. 

Victoria Moul, The foam or the blaze: the poetry of Béatrice Douvre

Patricia Lockwood is a wonderful prose writer — and also the author of one of my favourite tweets — but she hasn’t published a new collection of poems since Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014). Agate Head / Stone Soup (Bloomsbury) is a double volume with a preface that describes how her imagination returned to poetry through a combination of avoiding the internet, learning metalsmithing, going on bike rides, and taking what she sees as Sylvia Plath’s attitude to poems: “Write them straight through, from beginning to end, don’t mess with them too much, and tell people you’re doing it”. 

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #47: Newfangleness

Edward Lear (1812–1888) must surely count as one of the most interesting and peculiar figures to live in the Victorian age — and that’s saying something, for the Victorians were as interestingly peculiar a people as the world has ever known.

A commercial artist, best known for his illustrations of scientific and popular books about birds, he was also a musician. And painter. And composer. And eccentric traveler. And inventor of the limerick (leaving aside Mother Goose’s ur-texts). Out of all his work, it is his nonsense verse that has survived: poetic extravagances that, though they are mostly taken as children’s poetry these days, he intended as works to be appreciated by adults. Nonsense is serious business, and Lear was the best at it. Think of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” (which we offered in February), “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” or “The Table and the Chair.”

Or take Today’s Poem, the 1877 “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” In six eight-line stanzas, Lear shows us his rollicking meter of three and four feet, with just enough dactyls to make the lines tumble across the tongue. The comic poem shows a genius of a small kind: interesting and peculiar. And fun. What more could one want from nonsense?

But it’s also worth noticing how rhyme drives the internal logic of the nonsense.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Pobble Who Has No Toes

The second full-length collection from Montreal-based poet and intermedia artist Leigh Kotsilidis, following Hypotheticals (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2011) [see my review of such here], is Some of Us May Live (Coach House Books, 2026), a collection some fifteen years, one might reason, in the making. I’m intrigued by the steady punch of Kotsilidis’ sharp and short-lined lyric sketchworks, offering accumulating phrases that thread together to form narrative shapes. Just listen to the opening of the three-page poem “FIRST PRINCIPLES,” that begins: “A theory exists / for each of us. // To stop motion, / something heavier must intervene. // There is nothing / that won’t crush you. // The more you suffer, / the more you remember. // A crisis churns / out opportunity. // Fame promises fun / until someone ODs. // We pay heed / only to what is useful.” Kotsilidis’ narrative shapes nearly form rings, from the phrase and the sentence to the poem, and into the collection itself, a book-length single moment of perpetual clarity. One might say that the sentences and phrases of Hypotheticals extend and interplay with an ongoingness, almost as a book-length line, broken up into line breaks and individual poems, run almost continuous from the first page to the last. Or, as the poem “WHAT WE CAN’T SEE” begins: “We wade at the edge / of what is beyond us // There is nothing more / than delusion // Men mistake porch bulbs / for moons // A body drifts indeterminately / unnoticed // Every body leaves / over time [.]”

At nearly one hundred and thirty pages (albeit with thirty pages of endnotes, perhaps the most I’ve seen for an individual poetry title), there’s a heft to this collection, and a shift in an ecopoetic from focusing the impact of climate crisis upon the landscape to that of the world’s inhabitants, offering a kind of bestiary, one comparable to Vancouver poet Meghan Kemp-Gee’s own full-length poetry debut from the same publisher, The Animal in the Room (2023) [see my review of such here]. “How / to communicate that / which has no name // or why a name said / again and again and again / dissipates.” she writes, to close the short poem “SUBLIMATION,” “Lying / among such incessancy / our bodies // concede; / a thousand bees / devour us irretrievably.” Kotsilidis’ clear-eyed interiorities ripple across the lyric, the landscape, attempting to articulate the question of how one is able to live amid such self-created crises. “We raise stone / and concrete edifices. / The only sounds between walls / the ones we create.” she writes, as part of “SCALE PROBLEM,” “We dismiss birds that signal / heavy weather. / Wait out high winds / threatening the next resonance disaster.” From stardust to oceans, suburbia to glaciers, selfies to snow fences, the scale of these accumulated poems, these questions, observations and life-lessons, is enormously rich, varied and complex, managing to encapsulate everything there is and might be, fully aware it can never be contained.

rob mclennan, Leigh Kotsilidis, Some of Us May Live

While waiting for the arrival of John Chmura’s new poetry collection, 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens, I listened to an audio version of John McPhee’s classic book, The Pine Barrens (1968), a seminal work of environmental and cultural reportage that began as a series of articles in The New Yorker in autumn 1967. McPhee’s descriptions of a vast landscape, ethereal and haunting, are echoed in Chmura’s poetry. Since this is a tale of two Johns, I’ll use their surnames throughout this blog post to avoid confusion.

Beyond the immense natural beauty, there are cultural and ecological tensions. Chmura’s collection opens on a winter highway with artillery practice heard in the distance, while “the only sign of life is roadkill.” There are road signs, though, and the green highway sign on the book’s cover is County Route 539 through the Pine Barrens, where he composed many of his poems. At times the signature trees are “phantom limbs draped in fog,” but the forest is always alive, and it is wiser than we are. From his poem, ‘Arborism’:

Never before has peaceable pine
or roving oak stumbled into a human grove
and thought how beautiful
are these creatures, snapping selfies,
to share with tendrilled friends.

After reading the collection, I commented to John: “I am tempted to blog this… not a review, but a reflection on your book in conversation with McPhee’s, as a reader encountering the region for the first time through these texts.” In response, he noted that the Pine Barrens are changing, not only from new development and natural disasters, but ethnic and religious tensions on the rise. In light of this, he wondered if some of his more speculative poems might come across as escapist.

Jenevieve Carlyn, “Histories in snakeskin and gossamer”: Reading John Chmura’s 539: A Year in the Pine Barrens

There is an early – now lost – paper by Boris Pasternak called ‘Symbolism and Immortality’ which argues that our impressions are subjective. However, he also argues that these subjective impressions are capable of being ‘the common property of man’. Pasternak is recalling this lost essay in his ‘Essay in Autobiography’ written in 1956 and he goes on, ‘I assumed that every human being leaves behind him when he dies his own share of this undying, racial subjectivity – the share contained in him in his lifetime . . . in this ultimate, subjective and yet universal area of the soul, art finds its . . . field of action and its main content’. He then remembers concluding that ‘the joy of living experienced by [the artist] is immortal and can be felt by others through his work . . . in a form approximating to that of his original, intimately personal experience’ (tr. Manya Harari, Poems 1955-1959 and The Essay in Autobiography, Collins Harvill, 1990).

In Pasternak’s own work these ideas emerge in poetic form in moments such as ‘I want the heart of the matter / Always in work, / The chaos of feelings’ (‘I want the heart of the matter’) and ‘Success is not your aim / Nor noise, but gift of self’ (‘Fame’s not a pretty sight’). In struggling to complete ‘Essays in Island Logic’ I felt I had been blocked because I have been too anxious to ascertain, or assert, its meaning. Returning to the sequence again after a few months I felt more sanguine about this – chilled and allowing. As Pasternak is saying, all my work argues my own matrix of experience – it’s not me but mine. The objective world (though unknowable still) is processed through my own particular mesh – my set of harmonies and disharmonies – and must emerge coloured, spun, almost texturised, according to my personal self. As Pasternak argues though, each individual self has sufficient in common with all mankind so that only the extremely eccentric individual will be unrecognisable to anybody else. Hence experiences are both unique and common. If this was not the case, then art would be either excruciatingly dull or utterly alien to us.

It strikes me this is not far from Keats’ valley of pain. We begin with the fundamental matrix of any human being – a body, drives, senses, loneliness, seeking love and companionship – and this is grown on through the hornbook of our individual experiences, becoming, as Keats says, more unique the more we experience. These days I feel the truth of this more and try to understand it far less – the accumulated complexity and richness of even my relatively narrow life. This is the root of my railing against fundamentalism (of any kind): that it denies access to mature experience. It short cuts the truth – at least the only one we can get to. It may seem attractive at times (of trouble) but it is always an error. Odysseus learns this I think in the ‘Essays’ sequence since his earlier self was a fundamentalist soldier (almost tautologous – the perceiver of vivid contrast of necessity, us and them, victory and defeat). His previous egotism, eloquence and persuasiveness suggest this. In the past he has always employed language as persuasion, and I remember how Auden became so wary of the persuasive powers of language around 1939. In my poem, the aging Odysseus no longer wishes to divide and persuade but rather to take life as a whole.

In contrast, his son, Telemachus, remains locked into his search for a form of fundamentalism – what he regards as a cause, a purpose. He has yet to (may never) grow into the more complex jacket that he needs to wear. Poor Penelope has led the restricted life of a conventional woman (her tending the geese as a child, her long waiting, her role in the house etc) and she quietly envies male mobility and their encounters with the world. I have not been radical with her portrayal – yet she too is best seen as seeking the complexity of truth. So there are three souls in the poem sequence, all variously encountering the world. The tourists are equally in search of a rather simplistic remedy to their lives elsewhere: vainly seeking in the wrong places, the beach, consumerism, sex, geographical escape. The solution – if we can speak in such terms – is an openness of soul. There: I’ve said it. This is the first occasion on which it does not feel pompous or laughable for me to talk in such terms. It is the goal of the wholeness of our awareness that suggests the holiness of self.

Martyn Crucefix, Another Look at Odysseus (after seeing Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’)

Here is my interview at Lithub with Emily Wilson. I really enjoyed doing this—keeping the focus on translation.

One of the most celebrated classicists writing today, Emily Wilson achieved a rare kind of literary stardom in 2017, when her translation of Homer’s Odyssey made her the first woman to publish a complete English version of the epic. Her work, which spans Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca as well as Homer, is known for its rigorous commitment to traditional meter and its startling clarity.

Increasingly a public figure as well as a scholar, Wilson found herself at the center of the cultural conversation again this year when Christopher Nolan cited her famous opening line as an important influence on his own conception of Odysseus, only for Wilson later to publish a sharply critical review of the finished film.

Like a lot of people, I was greatly looking forward to reading her new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, which will be out in the US this September from Liveright. As a translator myself, I was especially eager to talk with her about the choices that make translation such an endlessly provisional art: what to preserve, what must inevitably be lost, and how to make an ancient world intelligible without losing the strangeness of it.

Leanne Ogasawara, Emily Wilson Talks Complicated Men, Celebrating Strangeness, and Why There is Always Another Way to Say It In Conversation

If you happen to be a writer, do you find there are times you doubt your audience? Are there readers (of your work)? Do they bother to pay attention, maybe for longer than 20 seconds? Can you name some people who support what you do as a word-artist? –I hope the answer to this is yes, but sometimes that dead-air drone of a satellite picking up no signals can feel discouraging. Literary journals that don’t get back to you for many a month; independent presses that offer no feedback for why they kept your manuscript for a year and then rejected it; I could go on, but you get the picture.

And maybe the problem, if there is one, is that you’re not keeping up. No dedicated website, not enough social media presence, no X thread, no podcast, no Tik-Tok book launch, no visual excitement. I mean, I get it. One reason I left academia when I did was that the university was making a change in its education LMS platform. I would have had to re-do all my tests, assignments, syllabi, etc. to mesh with the new platform, which would have required hours of Zoom and in-person training for which I would not be remunerated. Oh, that and the spectre of ChatGPT/Claude. And fibromyalgia symptoms taking over my days.

Nope.

I’m just going to sit with this knowledge for awhile, see whether I can balance 1) my desire to reach people through poetry in books and journals and online with 2) my desire to opt out a bit further from the popular culture that I and most US citizens grew up with. Poetry and popular culture overlap occasionally but not often [Rupi Kaur & such like], except in the poems themselves, since poets can hardly help but live within their cultures/societies. In contemporary poetry, I’ve seen references to cell phones, credit cards, artificial intelligence, smart cars, social media, celebrities. Heck, I have used those things in my poems. I love the metaphorical possibilities of the GPS, for example.

Ann E. Michael, Radio Nowhere

I’m not a believer in a writer being a “channel” for receiving language from some other-worldly place. I know that it is me writing the things I write, though I try to remain open to possibility, to play with sound and language in ways that are pleasing to the ear, to freewrite into weirdness. And these can lead to unexplained juxtapositions and successful moves I would not have come up with otherwise. But sometimes, I can arrive at a place where I surprise myself, write a line or an idea that makes me wonder “Where did that come from?” or “Did I really write that?” And, in my experience, that is when I know I have something.

I think this may be the reason that topical prompts usually leave me cold. When I set out to write about a specific topic, or focus on a linear narrative type of prompt (i.e., “a time when”), I lose the very thing I love about writing—the play and the experimentation. The magic beans in the breakfast cereal. The horns pushing through a nightgown. The meandering and the mess. The trusting of the internal compass to lead me to a place that is both crafted and “witch-crafted,” by which I mean, built with intention but also allowing for the unexplained to creep in.

More often than not, this approach leaves me with poems that never see the light of day. Journals and computer file folders full of them, to be honest. I just threw away a giant plastic tub’s worth of journals that have been collecting dust in the basement for years, thinking they held some kind of magic or mystery. But as I flipped through them, I realized that they were not special. They were frighteningly similar in some aspects over the years—entries about teaching stress or my frustration with my weight in the pages that weren’t poem ideas, and poem ideas that had either been fleshed out and moved long ago to the computer or died on the page. There was no need to keep them, and tossing them out felt a little like lifting an anchor, leaving me ready to sail on into whatever unexplained mystery comes next. In writing. In living. In a place where not everything needs an explanation to feel true.

Donna Vorreyer, Unsolved Mysteries

Writing poetry is a bit like a sculptor at work, carving a block of stone. The art is inside the stone, and all the excess must be removed to get to the art itself. An important point to remember is the finished statue or carving already exists inside that block of stone, but excess and portions of rock must be continually removed until the art is reached. But it’s there waiting. It’s been there. […]

The poem I was trying to draft became knotted, jumbled, unclear – too much telling on my part and even, in some lines, too much showing. Both may be equally damaging to the piece being written IF the poem is something else entirely. If my feeling about the subject matter is large, I might think the writing needs to be large. No. It’s not always that way. With this poem, “9,” my feeling was large, but the writing needed to become more laser-like, more focused. I began to cut away, to let go of phrasing, of images – and the piece found the page. The poem isn’t haiku, but it is fairly brief, twelve lines. My feeling was intense, and I wanted the poem to be long, to be full. My want for the piece was getting in the way of a poem. The poem wanted and needed something else, something less.

Sam Rasnake, Here, Let Me Bore You for a Bit

I never automatically assumed that poetry primarily belonged on the page. I wrote exclusively with live audiences in mind. When I came into a windfall after doing the Nationwide ad, I never even considered a collection — my money went on taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017, which then toured UK theatres in 2018. It was only when VERVE approached me to publish the show’s poems in a book that I even began to consider them on the page.

I also believe that class plays a role here. I come from a working-class background, and whilst creativity was always encouraged (my dad is a very talented painter), the publishing industry always seemed way out of reach, to the extent that it wasn’t even on my radar.

Finally, I have to confess that impatience is also a factor. Which makes sense considering I was diagnosed with ADHD in June last year, but when I first started, ADHD was just a lyric in a Natasha Bedingfield song.

If I’ve written a poem, I want it on MySpace Music within the hour, and I want to perform it at Escobar when I’m hosting an indie gig tomorrow night. No way am I spending two years chipping away at a manuscript with all of the poems in the dark.

Poetry is punk, it’s DIY, it’s urgent and essential. Spoken word poetry (or poetry spoken aloud) requires no barriers or equipment: it only needs an audience, an opportunity, a moment. This is what I loved about it in those early days and what I still love about it now. It can happen very quickly and spontaneously when it needs to, and if there are two things that a poetry collection isn’t, it’s quick and spontaneous.

On submitting my collection for typesetting – guest post by Matt Abbott (Trish Hopkinson)

Performance establishes the tone much more clearly, makes the main thrust of the poem unmissable. The print version, while initially harder to penetrate, permits more nuance and subtlety, and ends up feeling more complete and cohesive.

But is it true to say that there have emerged, broadly speaking, two distinct types of poem: one attuned more to the page, one to the stage? It’s hard to deny it entirely. When you listen to the kind of work performed at poetry slams, then turn to what is published in prominent poetry journals and award-winning books — or even if you compare poems distributed in video form to those published as texts — it’s apparent that different traits are prized. […]

Essentially, one might say that the stage poem is angled toward the limbic system — the part of us that feels and reacts instinctively — while the page engages the neocortex, the part of the brain that processes ideas, patterns and language more deeply and methodically. As such, the ‘page poem’ has come to be defined in contrast to the stage poem, as a primarily intellectual form — a vessel for new, difficult and delicate ideas which are unlikely to provoke immediate excitement.

The full picture is more complex. Page poems, of course, also make use of rhythm and rhyme — effects that are felt before they are understood. They are full, too, of emotional cues. And it is possible to find a balance; skilled performers and writers can come up with work that fits comfortably into both environments, even if it means they don’t take full advantage of one or the other.

Additionally, the two modes have actively sought compromise. Poetry publishers desire the larger, more diverse audience that the stage poem is able to draw so much more easily, while performer-poets and their promoters are attracted by the less short-lived nature of a successful book, as well as the stronger claim that page poems have to an artistic lineage. So both will sometimes imitate aspects of the other, and individual poets will often try to straddle the line, with varying degrees of success.

Jon Stone, RESOURCE / “Are stage poems and page poems different things?”

I suppose now is a good time to read the comments from one reader and then another. They represent two types of negative commentary: incurious and curious. One expresses what he believes is “fact” while the other admits his comment is an “opinion” based on evidence. One wants attention but is resistant to intellectual engagement while the other one desires a conversation.

From what I gather, the section of the poem which reads the most like “crumbly cement” is where I employed apophatic rhetoric, meant to riff on one of the most poetic sections of the New Testament, the definition of love explored in 1 Corinthians:

“Love is always patient and kind; love is never jealous; love is not boastful or conceited…”

There are things in the first half of the poem that have hidden meanings for me and my husband, such as the fact I have a severe allergy to the cherry blossoms that lined the large avenue near the university where we met. And there are no quiet Sunday mornings because getting five children ready for Mass isn’t a quiet affair. (It’s mostly me shouting, “No one’s going to church looking like a HOBO!”) However, I wrote all of these in a way that I thought would be relatable to any reader. Do they read like a string of clichés? I guess to some yes, and to others no? The editor who chose this poem for publication didn’t think this was a problem.

I tried to keep memorability and musicality front and center through the use of anaphora (“It’s not…”) and strict use of iambic meter with absolutely no substitutions, which is meant to mimic the beat of the heart. (The only line that appears headless or acephalous is preceded by a line that has a feminine ending.)

The “trite” title is borrowed from a song in Disney’s original Cinderella (1950). “So This Is Love” contains lyrics like “so this is what makes life divine” and “the key to all heaven is mine / my heart has wings.” In the movie, the words simply mean the couple has fallen in love, but when considered with my poem the “heaven” is more literal. The line “I heard you hum” which describes what I saw when my husband held our baby also evokes the humming in the original song.

I’ve been reading Joshua Hren’s title essay from his new book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature. He references Scottish philosopher David Hume’s thoughts about beauty as being personal sentiment. From “Of a Standard of Taste:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (ST 7, Mil 229-30)

However, many philosophers have argued that beauty isn’t purely subjective. To counter Hume, Hren brings up German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand’s “Aesthetics” which argued that beauty “adheres to the object as a quality, independently of whether someone understands it, reacts appropriately to it, or enjoys it.” Just because someone enjoys kitsch doesn’t mean it should be celebrated as beautiful. There is a certain level of discernment that must take place, not relying on pure sentiment, and this is something that Hren understands as the co-founder of the University of St. Thomas’s MFA program where I am a student. All MFA candidates are required to take a course called Philosophy of Art and Beauty where we become well acquainted with Plato, Aristotle and other early philosophers who create a foundation for exploring Thomist aesthetics which defines beauty using the three main conditions of integritas (wholeness), consonantia (proportion), and claritas (radiance or clarity). These are things I constantly think about when I write my poetry. I’ve taken Craft of Poetry, another required course, where students learn the strictest definitions of metrical order. Most of the poems I have published are pieces that I have worked on for many months, if not years, because I am working to bring a wholeness, proportion and clarity to my verse. “So This Is Love” was written over the course of a year. I challenge anyone who tells me that I don’t know about craft and that this particular poem I’ve published in Nimrod is objectively and thoroughly bad.

I know people who hate heavy metal, and I know people who love it. I know people who hate modern art and those who love it. I know people who hate any trace of didacticism in poetry, and whose who don’t mind it, or even enjoy it. I know people who like dry, crumbly scones and those who like moist, buttery ones. There is such a thing as taste, and I am willing to concede that what I write is not to someone’s liking. What I would like critics to consider is that maybe there is something good and true about a poem despite not liking it.

I am the type of person who doesn’t want positive or negative critique; I want truly critical reviews that seek to improve poetry and ask questions about it, with charity and curiosity. The goal of my life is to seek the good of others, and one of the ways for me to help other writers is to understand the craft myself. One of the skills I’ve had to develop is how to receive negative feedback — publicly and privately. But I’ve also learned that sometimes the feedback reveals more about the critic than my actual work.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Love’s Labor is Lost on Some

once, in the early pandemic, i bought
a teeth whitening kit. i was spending
way too much time with my face. mirrors
bloomed where there never had been before.
i missed everyone who used to hold me.
my flesh, like a stage curtain. i put on
a whitening strip & turned off the tv.
silence, lapping at my feet. teeth ringing
like tuning forks. when i took it off,
there wasn’t as much change as i had hoped.
instead, a soft white across my mouth.
i smiled at every mirror i could. threw out
the rest of the box.

Robin Gow, 9/8

The trouble with literary criticism—whether it is done by school children or professors or freewheeling writers—is that it cannot be defined. Some critics write about biography, some about historical context, some about the dreaded French Theory, and some pick a poem apart word by word, as if they were stripping a Sunday chicken, ready to be broken up, put back into the pot, and boiled to make stock. This is by no means an adequate list of the various ways of reading. But we can make a distinction between those people who care about the way a poem makes you feel and those who care about how it is done.

This is the distinction, as Adam Kirsch puts it in The Modern Element, between “art and magic”. We call this the distinction between enchanters and engineers, or between Prospero in his cell and Faust in his study. The magic of poetry is the way that it can create a new sense of the world—can make you believe in things not merely unbelievable, but which we know to be untrue. The art of poetry is in the specific wording of the spell—change the words, get the order wrong, and the magic will not manifest.

Critics are often divided into two groups, like sheep and goats—Iliad people and Odyssey people; comedy people and tragedy people; Tolstoy people and Dostoevsky people—and we can divide them along the lines of art and magic too. When I was young, the two most obvious examples of these groups were Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler was a practitioner of Art criticism: no word could be examined too closely, nor related too carefully to the rest of the poem. Bloom was a Magic critic, who believed poetry was what Keats called “A drainless shower/Of light”, which illuminated new realms.

Of course, all such distinctions are to some extent false. You might think Samuel Johnson was an Art critic, judging poets’ care for their meter and rhyme, but we find him under the sway of poetry all the time. He was often overpowered, especially by Shakespeare, who haunted him always, by what he called “the force of poetry, that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter.” That force is the essence of poetry’s magic.

For some of the Magic critics, poetry gives us access to a divine realm, a place beyond this world, Platonic, eternal, higher. Poetry is Magic in the sense that it is spiritual, giving access beyond what we can ordinarily experience. For the Art critics, Kirsch says, following Poe, poetry is a kind of mechanism that plays upon our feelings and evokes sensations. Clearly, both sorts of critic believe in Johnson’s force of poetry, but for different reasons: one because of the spiritual power of the poet, the other for his ability to work a technical use of language.

Again, we are loaded with a false distinction, but still a useful one. It is merely a trick of the rhyme, or is there a “really real” dimension of poetry, something spiritual, closer to prayer? Is poetry Longinian or Aristotelian?

Henry Oliver, What is literary criticism if it is not close reading? Art, Magic, and Common Sense.

In my classes, I’ve often used the work of Federico Herrero to talk about attention. Herrero is a Costa Rican artist whose paintings bring together vivid color, irregular shapes, landscape, abstraction, and the visual language of lived environments. One piece I’ve returned to is “Caravan,” a large 2018 oil and acrylic painting on canvas.

In “Caravan,” blocks and patches of color gather across the canvas in ways that feel dynamic and alive. There are shapes that suggest buildings and bodies, signs and landscape. Color suddenly feels like movement. Some areas feel dense and social, others more open. The eye keeps having to decide where to go, then revise that decision. The painting does not give itself over all at once.

That is part of what I love about bringing this kind of work into a classroom. It asks us to slow down and notice how we notice. The more time I spend with “Caravan,” the more I see how attention and looking are active relationships. The painting changes because I change in front of it. Or, more accurately, I become better able to see what was already there.

This connects to revision because when we return to a draft, it can be tempting to arrive with an agenda. But sometimes the draft needs us to sit with it first and let the page teach us how to read it. Revision becomes a practice of renewed attention.

José Angel Araguz, Federico Herrero and Revision as Listening

A few years ago I received an email from the great (and now, sadly, late) theatre director Michael Boyd. He had been commissioned to direct a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for the Royal Opera House, and he asked if I’d be interested in making it singable in English. Michael told me he’d read and enjoyed a version I’d made of Rilke’s Die Sonnette an Orpheus, and had hoped I might do a similar number on Alessandro Striggio’s libretto for what is often considered the first modern opera. With the benefit of hindsight, ‘hard pass’ was the one sensible answer available to me; but in my defence, I was not in possession of all the relevant info. I forgot to ask. My ego – the antihero in this little tale – was too busy with ‘It’s Michael Boyd! It’s the ROH! It’s Monteverdi! It’s Orfeo! Maybe I’ll get on the poster!’ So I agreed, and with reckless alacrity.

I’d worked with composers before. These relationships were usually described as ‘collaborative’. In my experience they were more accurately ‘cooperative’, me with them, and correctly so. Whatever you may have been told, the music is more important, and your text is going to be used primarily as a way of shaping the air; composer’s edits can therefore be anything between pitiless and nonsensical, and feedback can be light. (I recall David Harsent telling me that he once delivered a libretto to Sir Harrison Birtwhistle, whose only comment was to weigh it up in his right hand with ‘Well it’s not fookin Siegfried, is it’, and then open a bottle. I’m sure his subsequent notes were more extensive.) My previous disagreements with contemporary composers mostly revolved around a bizarre collective refusal – widespread, if not universal – to take much interest in either the prosody of the English line or the form the poem supplied. A poem written in ballad meter, say, would likely end up set as something totally bonkers that made no reference to the song-form from which it was derived.

No one is suggesting that all ballads should be set to ‘Oh Susanna’, but there are plenty of sympathetic alternatives; however the power imbalance has led to a general ignorance among composers of the better solutions available. For example, while iambic pentameter can’t be sung well in 5/4 even in Bulgaria, it’s very easy to set it in a half-time 3/4 – in other words, nearly all Shakespeare works just fine as a slow waltz, e.g. Shall ONE compare thee TWO a summer’s THREE [duh dah] / Thou ONE more lovely TWO more temper-THREE [duh dah] Rough ONE do shake the TWO-ling buds of THREE [duh dah] … etc. Which, while a useless way to scan it – Nicholson Baker got too excited over this old idea in The Anthologist – is an elegant way to sing i.p., and once the bar is established, you have a lot of freedom over placing the stress. (I.p. also works great in 4/4, where you split the line over two common-time bars: go and listen to Chet Baker singing ‘There Will Never Be Another You’, rare amongst jazz standards in that it features several lines of immaculate pentameter.) But surely L’Orfeo would be a far easier job? The music was finished. The text was already half written. Best of all, Monteverdi and Striggio were dead. Despite their poor rep, I have always found the dead to make wonderful and generous collaborators. I mean some of my best friends are dead.

Don Paterson, On the Importance of Doing a Bad Job

I’ve fallen in love with the wind.
Why? Because it sounds like poetry.
Like feeling romantic with the sea
or the barn one has already left
lured by what one imagines to be
(missing, after all, a front end) the scent
of long grass and the possibility
of great distance.
Plato believed in the primordial
horse costume, each of us united
with our other half in a utopian range.
I like the unobstructed view
and the gap.

Gary Barwin, Sonata for Horse Costume

If you, like me, have been saving up poems to send out in September when lit mags tend to open, albeit briefly (onto that in a second), you may have noticed a frustrating trend: the day the magazine opens for submissions, it hits its whatever cap on Submittable—and closes the same day. I spent two hours this week trying to submit but finding every place that advertised being open actually closed because of this “cap.” A terrible way to run a lit mag, and an institutionalized way of making writers feel powerless and worthless—and believe me, we already feel that way without lit mags charging $5 to reject us after six months if we are lucky enough to get in the three-hour window (East Coast time, of course). I almost gave up submitting poetry for good. I know I get discouraged with the poetry world, the lack of acclaim, money, respect, etc.—but this new hurdle is so rotten for any working person, caregiver, or West Coast person, honestly, I thought I needed to raise the issue.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Submissions, September 11, Setbacks, and the DMV

Over the past month or so, I’ve been seeing more and more publishing opportunities for AI-generated content.

Nicole Foor, Managing Editor of NewPages, has launched a new magazine, Beat My AI. She wrote to me,

[W[ith AI policies hitting more and more mags, it is always interesting to see how journals choose to actively incorporate AI into their journals. Such is the premise of Beat My AI which accepts two kinds of work: Works where 1/3 of content is generated by AI and original human works responding and changing the AI portion of a piece into something wholly human written and “better.”

The project looks interesting. The editors argue here that no matter what your opinion about it, “AI is here to stay.” Rather than draw a hard line against the technology,

Beat My AI implements a different approach. Because no problem has ever truly been solved by burying your head in the sand or looking the other way.

But before you rush to groan or condemn them, note that their submissions guidelines are not quite what you may think.

Here, they invite works that are human-created, but which have a clearly marked section that is AI-generated. This is called the “Original.” Writers are then invited to submit work, which seeks to improve upon the AI portion. This is the “Contender.” Over six weeks, readers vote for which contender piece fits best with the original. Hence, beat my AI.

It seems like a magazine actually more dedicated to human writing than AI writing, albeit using AI as, well, a prompt to stimulate human creativity.

Whatever you think about it, I’ve certainly never seen a lit mag that openly invites submissions which improve upon what has already been published. Since, in this case, the portion to be improved upon is AI-generated, presumably no one will take offense at the suggestions!

Becky Tuch, Happiness is a Warm Lit Mag!

I have the distinct impression that written-page poets and print-based publishers are currently suffering from a growing struggle to reach their readers and customers, having gradually shifted their means of communication from snail mail to email newsletters and then to social media over the past twenty years.

Insta has always been more focused on spoken word, so the poets and publishers in question tended to concentrate their efforts on Facebook and Twitter. The former is now weighed down by ads and reels, meaning that it’s hard for posts to gain traction. Meanwhile, the average age of its users is rising.

And as for the latter, Twitter became the social media of choice for umpteen publishers and poets. Many had huge follower counts, got numerous shares and likes on their posts, and managed to drive much of their online promotional, marketing and sales activity through it. However, Twitter’s change in ownership, name and algorithms has ripped all that asunder. Many people and organisations have given up on X or limited their use of it, while the reach of posts has dropped through the floor.

In this context, a lot of outfits and individuals in the poetry world saw Bluesky as a natural alternative and rushed to open up new accounts there. A few months later, the majority of those accounts have been abandoned. I’d argue that this is because barely anybody stopped to consider that Bluesky works differently from X/Twitter, and your posts will wither and die if you attempt to follow similar communications strategies on both platforms.

Nevertheless, whatever the arguments in favour or against Bluesky might be, the fact remains that the core of U.K. written-page poets and print-based publishers are scarcely using it. But what’s their alternative plan? How do they intend to maintain contact with their readers and customers over the coming years? Given the atomisation of social media platforms, many new titles, launches, reviews, sample poems, etc, seem to be disappearing into the void. As a poetry lover, I find this situation deeply concerning. How can we communicate better?

Matthew Stewart, Communication

To round off the review, Mark [Fiddes] kindly agreed to answer three questions about the collection [Hotel Petroleum] and I have included his answers in full below.

Your work combines elements of reportage with deeply impressionistic, lyrical expression. How do you judge where to strike the balance between the two in a poem, or indeed across a collection?

At a time when the leader of the free world has effectively turned current affairs into a reality TV show with him as the host/ringmaster, you want to say “Stop! These are real people. Real schools. Real bombs.” At the same time, you need to take a breath and say “Wait, have you tasted the pomegranate juice?” I believe our role as poets more than ever is to restore some sense of humanity and vulnerability to our increasingly transactional discourse.

Another strain within your work seems concerned with accenting, even playing with, the absurdities of modern life, e.g. rampant consumerism, the hyperbole of ad copy, the dehumanising language of bureaucracy. Where does this influence come from? Do you draw on your experiences as a creative director and formerly as a journalist?

Yes. I have had to write in many different modes and voices over the years, from investigative reporter at the Pentagon to scripting for National Geographic and even Durex. It’s hard not to let that language leak into the poetry – or sometimes to adopt it as a template. For example one of the pieces in the book came from an Out Of Office vacation message that grew into a poem. Last week, I flipped an irritated email to IKEA into a lyrical design brief for a new sofa.

I particularly enjoyed those poems in Hotel Petroleum where you seem to be in conversation with certain representatives of the canon (Larkin, John Clare…) and with the idea of what it is to be a poet. What do you think about the state of poetry today? Are we in good health?

In theory, yes. Global sales are up. Distribution via social media has never been higher. But poetry must take on today’s big challenges to remain relevant. First, Populism and its goose-stepping algorithms that divide and ‘other’ society. Poetry is the opposite. Its power is the power of belonging, to remind us of the basic humanity that unites us. The second challenge is artificial intelligence reducing the agency we have over our own lives. Poetry can be the wake-up call not to outsource our curiosity and experience but to relish the lucidity of the present moment.

Mark Fiddes lives in the Middle East and Catalonia, although he is currently in Prague as poet-in-residence in Kafka’s House for Prague UNESCO City of Literature. He has written three other books of poetry and a libretto ‘Threadlands’ with composer Joanna Marsh. His work has won the Ledbury Prize, the Oxford Brookes University Prize and the Ruskin Prize with awards in the National Poetry Competition, the Forward Poetry Prize and many more.

Victoria Spires, Welcome to your chosen moral universe, enjoy your stay

i’m currently preparing some notes towards a round table discussion on resisting the right through arts and culture. one of the provocations i’ve been set to think about is why the right are winning the war of ideas. to which my still incomplete answer is something like this: it’s not a war of ideas, it’s a war on ideas, one the entire media and communications architecture of the twenty-first century is geared to facilitate. it isn’t just that new platforms facilitate the spread of right-wing ideology, but that the kinds of discourse that they foster favour fascist thinking: shallow, aestheticised content, encouraging (also monetising) extreme declarative speech acts that admit no doubt, no otherwise, no challenge; information returned to us by algorithm, the nuance shaved out, instant answers only as good as the questions we know to ask. the medium matters, and this medium shapes and delimits thought, allows only certain forms of thought to root and spread. of course there’s a love-in between tech-bros and far-right politicians: tech is bringing about the material conditions for the fascist mind-virus to thrive.

sorry, that last sentence got a bit matrix-y, didn’t it? how early aughts of me. but it has been on my mind. it was on my mind when i sat down to write the poem [here], wondering if a poem could be a material tool/ an enabling architecture for (mental) resistance, could foster or incite another kind of thought – slow thought, ambiguous thought, historically and sympathetically rich thought? i don’t meant to suggest that my poem in particular was doing this, just that poetry in general, as a mode, might. which is where I chose to end the poem, on a fighting back that is first the writing of the poem, the reading of the poem – any poem – and a mental effort of understanding towards people whose moral position we find utterly repellent. can art create these conditions?

i don’t know, but my thoughts lead me back to “noli timere”, which is a call to courage, but also an offering of aid. the message i want the work to carry – the intention i want it to transmit, whatever it is ostensibly about – is something like “i am with you”. to raise a voice and a mind. like a shield, like sword. a torch to light our way…

Fran Lock, “NOLI TIMERE”

On the news this week, it was reported
that we claimed ownership of the moon—

its hammered surface rising over beaches,
schools, parking lots, and detention centers;

its cratered Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11
touched down and the astronauts left bootprints

that are still there because the moon has no weather
to wash them away. Perhaps someone will also try

to claim ownership of the bees and their gold
cells, the rivers and all their tenants folding silver

light beneath the bridges. 

Luisa A. Igloria, Declaration of Ownership

You will hear the word culture used a lot. Often angry, pink-necked men will roar about ‘their culture’ being threatened, perhaps without really knowing what ‘their culture’ is. And this is understandable because culture is always changing ownership. The other week I performed ‘My Name Is Swan’ at Garrick’s Temple to Shakespeare on the banks of the Thames. It was, you might say, an evening of culture, of music and poetry set in an idyllic location. For some, this kind of event is culture, high-brow, removed, separate. I feel uncomfortable with spaces that are reserved for art, domains distinct, detached, divorced. I’m not entirely sure this is where poetry belongs.

The Garrick Temple was commissioned by David Garrick, an actor and theatre reformer who changed culture, on one hand by making theatre more professional and on the other by making it more exclusive, expensive and elitist. He converted ‘the pit’ from standing to seating, championed a naturalistic, expressive acting style, introduced moveable scenery, lighting and stagecraft. He made theatre respectable but, with the introduction of higher ticket prices, he also excluded poorer, working class people who had made up the majority of the audience in Shakespeare’s day.

This is cultural erosion, this is the big steal. The denial of access to the arts leads to the kind of civil bankruptcy and social insolvency that has angry, pink-necked men roaring about the good old days without really knowing what the good old days actually offered. While they do know something is missing from ‘their culture’, while they may point accusatory fingers elsewhere, they are perhaps unaware that what they are being denied is poetry.

At the time of Shakespeare’s tricentenary in 1864 it was well understood that the poet had been appropriated by the wealthy and the well healed and that it was time to reclaim him for the people. Shakespeare had after all been born of the working man and the Working Men’s Shakespeare Committee was set up in opposition to the official, government-backed National Shakespeare Committee who, it was felt, were using the anniversary to promote a pro-Empire, elitist narrative. To recast Shakespeare as a democratising figure, a satirist of corrupt kings and courts the Working Men’s Committee decided to mark the 300th anniversary of the poet’s birth by planting a tree. They didn’t create an effigy, they didn’t build a temple, they planted a tree in a public space as a reminder that poetry, as well as being a living art-from, should be free for everyone.

In 1864 100,000 people marched through the streets of London to Primrose Hill to witness the act of putting in a sapling for a poet. 100,000 people walking for poetry. I think it’s important we consider that occaision, reflect on what it was they were walking for and, at a time of huge social and economic disparity, think about who poetry belongs to today.

Last week two of us went to visit the tree. It’s not the original, it was replanted in 1964, but this what poetry teaches us, if an idea dies you plant another. Naomi [Foyle] spoke eloquently about re-enchanting the world with poetry and while walking is still free I’m trying to find enchantment between sites, at locations, in doorways and under the branches of trees. I am still moving toward poetry.

Jan Noble, Nº81 The Shakespeare Oak

“What I fear most is despair
for the world and us: forever less
of beauty, silence, open air,
gratitude, unbidden happiness,
affection, unegotistical desire.”

— Wendell Berry, from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, page 192

[…]

— I’ve been thinking about happiness, and the first poem in this post and the phrase, “unbidden happiness” has me thinking. I’ve been also thinking about contingency a lot lately, the idea that “if not this, then that.” And that led me to cracking open The Affect Theory Reader and looking again at Sara Ahmed’s essay, “Happy Objects.” Ahmed acknowledges “the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds, the drama of contingency, how we are touched by what we are near.”

— “It is useful to note that the etymology of “happiness” relates precisely to the question of contingency: it is from the Middle English “hap,” suggesting chance.”

— What are theories of happiness beside happiness itself? Does one practice happiness? One practices the piano, we take up a practice of writing.

— Bruce gets it. Trouble is never far behind. But we can hold another in our hearts. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi says that “happiness, in fact is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person.” (from TATR).

— What are the conditions of happiness now? Being human means we have the very weird capacity to be both happy and sad simultaneously. Melancholic with intermittent happiness. Wild, right?

Shawna Lemay, Against Despair

Dolly Parton’s death was a gut-punch. I was a lifelong fan, discovering her old 1970s television variety show when I was 5 years old. I was so obsessed that my parents bought me the Dolly doll that was released in 1976 when I found it at a KB Toy Store (remember them?!) in the mall. I’ve still got her, as you can see in the photo. […]

In 2023, my poem “Roosters & Hens” appeared in Limp Wrist and was then selected by co-editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E, Bloemeke for inclusion in Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology published by Madville (who also just published the Stevie Nicks anthology I co-edited). The poem is a roman à clef about seeing “9 to 5” that first time under very strange circumstances. You can read that poem here.

We are living through a particularly dark time, with the nonsense coming from Washington, D.C., the ongoing wars, the economy, the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Dolly was an antidote to that darkness. Her empathy, positivity, and embrace of all kinds of people were a counterbalance to the politicians and policymakers who try to divide us.

As a cancer survivor myself, I am awed that she was able to continue making in-person and social media appearances. Always with a smile, always with hope, even as she must have been exhausted and in pain. That selflessness is a lesson for us all.

Dolly famously joked about her appearance, often repeating the line, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” The truth is that behind that sassy persona was a woman who believed in the basic goodness of people. She didn’t make a spectacle of her generosity, ask for buildings to be named after her, or play favorites. Dolly said that when she saw a need, she immediately wanted to help, and she did.

May we all be more like Dolly. 

Collin Kelley, I will always love Dolly Parton

And of course the Contral, with its three wheels,
was never going to make it. And long before
it sinks into sand out in the fathomless desert,
Auguste understands failure is not the point.
He bends to kiss the clogged carburettor, sits
in the perilous seat one last time, weeps.
My beautiful girl, we did try, didn’t we.

He drains the radiator into a water bottle,
walks slowly east, retracing tyre tracks, dreams.
He prays for his miracle –  and nomads appear
on horseback, incredulous to see such a thing:
a fat man in a suit and beret. They give him tea.

Bob Mee, POEM IN THE COMPANY OF AUGUSTE PONS AND PETIN THE SHORT

This week, maps argue among themselves, the dark blooms and sings, a bookcase holds its breath, moths interrogate a porch light, and much more. Enjoy.

On the first day of September I am woken by geese flying over the house. They’re still going back and forth between two lakes right now, strengthening their wings, preparing for the long flights they’ll make in a few weeks. The sound is superb. They fly so low that I can hear their wing beats. The new season begins with watching the sky while the coffee burbles in the pot. I stand at the back door, the kitchen filled with low sunlight and long shadows, the garden white with dew and I listen to the plush feathery wing beats of geese over the house. Their calls are dark mornings and woodsmoke, and deep work, creative work. I take my coffee up to my writing room and settle in front of the monitor.

Wendy Pratt, I want to show my workings out

I’ve been in a state of ennui and mild hopelessness all summer, and I haven’t written since the Lenten Series earlier in the year. I needed some fresh oxygen. I bought a brand-new journal and headed to my neighborhood library, armed with a pen, a back up pen, and Lofi beats in my headphones. Regardless of output, I just wanted to feel the sensation of a pen moving across paper, my thoughts flowing freely and without distraction, and reconnect with my natural rhythm and intuition.

I’m a little surprised at how well it worked. There is something magical about the process of simply journaling, without expectation, without anxiety about “creating” or self-made pressure to produce. Threads come together in mysterious ways, your brain makes quiet connections, and somewhere in that tangled tree-light of messy ink, something begins to emerge that you can use as starter. I don’t know where it’s all going to go—I don’t have any big themes in mind for a series or any heart-pounding flashes of inspiration to run with, but it’s an opening, and that’s all I needed.

Kristen McHenry, Fall Metaphors

i go out in the morning
without my skin. i rush back inside
to put it on. the moment of light
free of all the flesh felt like
swallowing an antidote. what would
it take for all of us to write on the sun
like a marble notebook? everyone i know
puts their dreams into little envelopes.
mails them to a fire on the other side
of the world.

Robin Gow, sunlight diary

After fiddling with wires and remote controls and instructions on my mobile phone for half an hour I was ready to strike out for that corner shop, which is just over a mile from my house.

I almost went in the car, before realising that it would be more pleasant, healthy, and green to walk there, especially as I could take a path through woodland for about four fifths of the trip.

Walking through woodland is always rewarding, even if the particular woodland near me is very small, in parts not much more than a tree lined path, which may contain traces of dog shit.

Woods are poetic. We all know some poetry set in woods. Perhaps one of the most well known contains these lines:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by

However, I am not quite the literary gentleman I think myself to be. Before turning to Robert Frost, my mind always defaults to…

A mouse took a walk in a deep, dark wood
The mouse found a nut and the nut looked good

… the concluding lines from Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo, the well-known 1999 book for reading with small children. […]

A walk in the woods is a real mood lifter. Everyone with any sense knows so. Tree huggers, forest bathers, and normal people too. I am privileged to live within walking distance of several. Some of them are old and overgrown cemeteries too, which is doubly poetic. Not only do you get the sense of nature all around, but also the sense of your own impermanence within it. Those crumbling headstones and statuary reminding us that none of us live forever, and the unkempt vegetation reminding us that nature will go on thriving long after we are gone.

Mike O’Brien, Gruffaloes, Tree Huggers and Wood Pigeons

This poem grew from 8’s emphasis on the contrast between darkness and light. I began the idea with the image of the dark forest trail leading to the opening above a valley covered in light. I was thinking of the contrast, of this and the other, of darkness and light, and then I started writing. A storm moved in, and I began listening to music. When I viewed the video poem All the Places Light Lives by Amantine Brodeur and Alix Klingenberg, the connection between the words and the imagery of each photograph began to speak to me. I connected with that process. The poem began to move. The difficulty in this piece was that it was demanding the approach of less is more. Keeping this piece to a few lines was a major task. Only the essentials remained.

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks; 9”

you walk the usual path 
when suddenly you have passed 
through a doorway you did not see 
the landscape has changed 
the road signs are in a language 
you do not read there are maps 
but they argue among themselves 

Sharon Brogan, snapshot poem 02 september 02026

Lucille Clifton’s “telling our stories” found me during a particularly rough stretch this spring. (I include a link to the poem below.) I was feeling haunted by some troubling flashbacks, and when I read, “the fox came every evening to my door” (and the lines that follow), I related immediately to Clifton’s fear and avoidance.

I also understood the depth of her connection to the fox. Dare I say, I understood it as a relationship with the fox… and with the “terrible stories” it — and the poet watching it — could tell. I felt deep resonance with the poem, and it spurred an obsession with fox imagery. I even had a close encounter this summer with a wild fox which had claimed a busy Cape Cod beach town as her hunting ground.

The Cape Cod fox startled me and I shooed her away, but normally when encountering wild life, I’m the sort of person who believes I’m having a shared moment with the creature. I even introduce myself to toads and newts. “I’m a human,” I say, and what I mean is I hold myself in high regard as the type of human an animal might like to know and befriend. When I hold the gaze of a deer or bird or, yes, a fox, I experience a true connection.

Intellectually, that connection is hogwash, of course. But spiritually? I’m a believer.

So when I read “Driving to Santa Fe” by Paisley Rekdal in a writing workshop from Two Sylvias Press (through their “Weekly Muse” Substack), I knew I needed to collect poems about wild animal encounters. The speaker in Rekdal’s poem […] comes upon a lynx crossing the road. Time slows, creating space for the speaker to understand what it means to be alive and to be humbled by it.

Carolee Bennett, “the fox came every evening to my door”

I took this photograph not understanding that perhaps it is a kind of self portrait. Balancing on one foot along the shoreline. The gull’s mottled coloring and black beak make me think she is a juvenile glaucous winged gull. It’s an unusual pose but as I stayed and observed her, she kept her balance and I hope I can do the same this September. But I am not so sure.

This is the last time I’ll begin the academic school year as a full-time tenured professor at Highline College where I will have taught for 27 years. Before I moved to Seattle, for this tenure track job teaching English and Film at Highline, five years was the longest I’d held any job. In my twenties and thirties, I changed countries seven times.

Now taking the water taxi downtown for the day is an adventure. I’ve just become a member at Folio: The Seattle Anthenaeum, located above the marketplace so the 15 minute water taxi commute will become more frequent. This is my first step in my retirement planning. My only one. Well, besides writing more poems.

At the moment, I’m working on two poems. One concerns a visit to my translator’s home in a refugee camp outside Ramallah in 1996 and the other is a memory of everyday life at three years old.

Susan Rich, Three Images and Prompts Before Summer Ends

The rest of the week was spent updating my resume (I’m tentatively looking for work again), writing poems, submitting poems (although not to Cincinnati Review or Prairie Schooner, which both closed in under a day, before I got in a submission, whew! Crazy! Submitting is an adventure sport these days.) Also, re-reading Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for book club. […]

Late summer all around—hot air balloons going up and down, hummingbirds at the final blooms of summer flowers, and earlier sunsets.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, September Submissions with Stressful Intervals, Storms, and Late Summer Sights

I’ve so many posts unposted, and a million distractions … but it seems important to share a Wendell Berry poem this morning.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

–Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/wendell-berry-dead.html

Also see Poetry Foundation, and this page at Grateful Living for a poem I’ve read dozens of times these past few years,  Berry’s “Our Real Work.”

Bethany Reid, Wendell Berry (1934-2026)

I was sad to hear of the death of Wendell Berry on Monday.  But why should I be sad?  He was 92 and had lived a good life, mostly on his own terms, from what I could see.  But the death felt like “one of the greats has left us” moments.  I remember reading him in college, so his writing has been with me a long time.

Back in my undergraduate days,  I felt somewhat embarrassed for liking someone whose work was so accessible.  Now, of course, I think it’s one of his more important traits.  Berry’s work has seemed vital for decades now.

What I value most these days is his ability to never sink into gloom for too long. He manages to sound prophetic (one of the prophet’s duties being to call people back to right living, as well as to warn), without setting up a house in the land of the apocalypse. He always comes back to one of his main themes: “. . . hope is one of our duties. A part of our obligation to our own being and to our descendants is to study our life and our condition, searching always for the authentic underpinnings of hope. And if we look, these underpinnings can still be found. For one thing, though we have caused the earth to be seriously diseased, it is not yet without health. The earth we have before us now is still abounding and beautiful” (“Conservation and Local Economy” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 11).

He wrote those words almost 20 years ago, and yet, they still have relevance.  Some days, when the news seems unrelentingly bad, it’s hard to continue to hope.  But it’s one of the more important activities we can undertake.

Here’s a passage that reminds us of the miracles which surround us each day:  “Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine–which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes” (“Christianity and the Survival of Creation” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, page 103).

That passage made me gasp when I first read it, and it still does.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Farewell, Wendell Berry

The writer Wendell Berry often talked about how imagination is required in order to have hope. To imagine is to see a way. “For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.” When the tiny first leaves arrived after a few weeks, I continued the routine of light and water. The work of beckoning growth was not complete. Meanwhile, the soil outside grew soft with spring’s warmth and rains, so I turned it with my hands. Into the soil, I placed worms I have also grown and fostered over the past couple of years. Eventually, the ceremony of carrying the trays up the basement steps arrived and the seedlings saw sun for the first time. They learned outside. They learned wind.

Sarah Lada, The Art of Harvesting Brussels Sprouts

I’m sad to hear that Rachel Blau DuPlessis has died. I persuaded my local library to buy the two volume boxed edition of Drafts this year, and think it’s brilliant. A real way forward for people who love long poems, sampling as it does the style of many other long poems.

It manifests many worlds theory, shimmer within lines and word choices, so that all components are “drafts” stemming, branching. A commitment to an experiment for decades. And there are wonderful personal moments, with this contingent willingness to have one’s life be contextualised.

I was very lucky to see her read over zoom with Allen Fisher reading too. It was noticeable how curious she was about Allen’s formal choices and long poem procedures.

I love her book of critical essays on the long poems of others too. Like Alice Notley, a great master of unpacking technique and then trying new techniques herself (and not as pastiche, but as someone whose creative brain was revved up by reading FOR FORM, not sentiment).

Her death is a great loss. But I’m so glad she finished Drafts and got it to a handsome complete edition. It is best read complete, in my opinion, and a modern masterpiece when seen in one edition.

Ira Lightman, Rachel Blau Duplessis RIP

If you’ve never eaten at a South Indian wedding, then imagine this: at least thirty different dishes served on a large plantain leaf, non-stop, until you cannot possibly eat another morsel. But of course, you do! A hundred textures, a hundred permutations of flavour and colour and aroma, inundate your senses and you stagger out, not just sated, but telling yourself you simply should be more social and attend more weddings. If only for the food.

This book was that meal. At 240 pages, it is an extensive collection of fifteen years of Bob Mee’s work. The breadth of skill, imagination, topics, style and form is overwhelming. The poems zigzag across a vast landscape of masterful storytelling, wry humour, barely-concealed disgust at the state of the world, surreal imagination, love, and memory,

It is almost impossible to pick a favourite poem or line because his content and frequent stream-writing flit from the past to the present, from politics to pig-farming, from scarecrows to neighbours, from Pennsylvania to Peterlee, from haunted bars to forgers, from Ezra Pound’s trombone to the ghost of Ginsberg, from pianos on the move to a little girl sold in marriage, from the dead to the living, from war zones to the bottom of the sea (‘Poems leave Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Sudan. Reach out, gather them in.’ – Poems), until the reader is convinced that everything that has to be said about literally everything that needs saying, has been said, and said in the only way possible. Mee employs laugh-out-loud satire and humorous irreverence or dispensing with obscure subtlety, writes with delicate but chilling honesty.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, ‘Poems In The Key Of Aardvark’ by Bob Mee – If you’re going to read only one more book this year, pick this one

From across a wide ocean I look in astonishment and horror at what is happening in the United States.

Here is a poet in the midst of it and still writing about it every day. I can barely imagine how he keeps on keeping on, but the sequence of poems entitled Writing My Country continues to hold power up to the light and to find it wanting.

“Beau Beausoleil is the most important voice of witness in our country right now …” – Naomi Shihab Nye

These poems of compassion and loss and obstinate resistance use everyday events, conversations and observations on the street to illustrate ‘this ruinous work’ that is taking place in a country that no longer feels like home.

“Our lives are filled
with the debris
of destroyed dreams” (p 13)

The altered flag on the cover seems to speak of imprisonment and disempowerment, but the poem superimposed on it asks stubborn questions that will not be silenced.

Ama Bolton, Writing My Country

their viscous prick-song spit into
the wind. an old, infectious fable. says
that it will fill them up. it cannot fill
them up, so makes instead a virtue
of their emptiness, a weapon of their
emptiness. they are not men, not now –
the hot and crackling aggregate
of rage. now they are joy, torn along
its leanest length; the gutless conjuring
of power, each hood without a head.

Fran Lock, NOLI TIMERE

I have, out of an abundance of caution, not named the Iranian poet whose interview with me I’ve been posting here one question at a time. Perhaps I am being too careful, but given the fact that we are at war with Iran, even if the federal government is going out of its way not to call what’s going on a war; given the corresponding fact that Iran very clearly understands itself to be at war with us; and, finally, given how literature—writing it, reading it, discussing it—is an inherently subversive pursuit, an abundance of caution seems just the right amount. I’ve tried several times to get in touch with this poet since the war began but have had no success. If I do hear back from them and it turns out I can safely identify them, I will do so. In the meantime, I am going to continue posting my answers to their questions.

I was not expecting the poet’s fourth question: “There is a theory that says that all writers even the male, write with a feminine soul. After all, the Muses were goddesses and not gods. What do you think about this theory?” This was my answer:

While I think I understand what you want your question to mean, it has never been useful to me to think about where my work comes from in such explicitly gendered terms. I have never experienced myself as having a muse or my poems as being somehow “gifts” from the Muses. Indeed, the one and only time anyone ever talked to me about my having a muse was my graduate advisor, a critical theorist, who dismissed my desire to take a year off from the MA in Creative Writing that I was pursuing so I could work on my writing by saying, “If you want to go commune with your muse [the sarcasm literally dripped off his words], that’s your business. I thought you came to graduate school to learn something.”

His words had the precise opposite of their intended effect. I dropped out of the program that semester and never set foot in either a graduate English or Creative Writing program ever again. (I’ve written the longer version of this story here.) In thinking about your question, though—and I have to say that this is something I’ve never explicitly articulated before—I realize that I do agree with one aspect of the critique underwriting my advisor’s attempt to use the notion of the muse to shame me. The concept of the muse mystifies the creative process, turning it into something that is ostensibly separate and apart from the socioeconomic, political, and cultural circumstances in which creativity takes place.

I don’t mean to say, of course, that there is no such thing as inspiration; and I certainly would never tell a poet who experiences inspiration as somehow coming from outside themselves, who experiences poems as “gifts” from their muse, that this experience is somehow “wrong.” However, defining that experience in a way that elides the role played by society and culture in shaping both our conception of what inspiration is and how we give meaning to a poet’s response to inspiration ultimately weakens the role that the poet and poetry can play in society.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Do All Writers Write with a Feminine Soul?

“What the Mirror Tells” explores the origins of the word ‘mirror’ – from Middle English meaning “object with a reflective surface, reflection, model of conduct” and Anglo-French “to look at”, derived from the Latin “to be surprised, look with wonder at”. It also asks if events and people linger long after their passing, does an aurora of those still hang around? […]

In each poem, [Denise] O’Hagan has created a small theatre where readers see the show and get [a] chance to reflect and probe its meaning. She also picks up those hesitations, where speaking out may not be received in the way the speaker wants to achieve, where it might shatter an illusion. Many of the poems sit in that liminal space between an event and [its] consequences, allowing the reader to fill in the detail and decide what might have next, what the effect might be. These are thought-provoking and humane poems.

Emma Lee, “What the Mirror Tells” Denise O’Hagan (5 Islands Press) – book review

One thing I’m realising more and more as I write these pieces is that I acquired much of my poetry in a decidedly circuitous and fumbling manner. Philip Larkin came to me third-hand: at sixteen I hadn’t read a word of his poetry, and I hadn’t read Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him, but I had read Alan Bennett’s honest and affectionate review of Andrew Motion’s reportedly honest and affectionate biography of him. The things we did before the internet. So Larkin arrived kind of distorted, a figure peered at through the wrong end of a telescope and through the lenses of two other men, this grumpy man in glasses who shagged his way round the library personnel of the North of England and had a soft spot for both Thatcher and Hitler, the kind of guy who’d take a girl on a date and later write to his friend

Don’t you think it’s ABSOLUTELY SHAMEFUL that men have to pay for women without BEING ALLOWED TO SHAG the women afterwards AS A MATTER OF COURSE?

Based on this picture, I assumed that his poetry probably wouldn’t be for me, and I moved on. I was about to be swept off my feet by Dylan Thomas, who I hadn’t read a review of a biography of, so that was fine.

But over the years Larkin poems dropped quietly one by one into my life: This Be The Verse, of course, and then The Trees, An Arundel Tomb, The Mower. I found it hard to compute, having read the biographical stuff first, that the man who wrote such tenderness as

begin afresh, afresh, afresh

and

what will survive of us is love

and

we should be kind while there is still time

was in fact the same bloke who Motion refers to as ‘a sexually disappointed Eeyore’. Well, this is why you’re supposed to meet the poems before the poet, and sometimes not the poet at all. Poets are real people, and flawed. It’s the poems that keep us fond of Larkin.

Nia Broomhall, Week 25: High Windows

In Boswell’s Life, Samuel Johnson says of poor Christopher Smart (1722–1771), locked in a madhouse: “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”

That line, “I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else,” has stuck with me since I first encountered it. Christopher Smart was a madman, a genius, and a Christian poet. What is most powerful in him, or, at least has most influenced me, is his mysticism, for it is not a grand thing — not the loss of the self in the absorption into the numinous, not the flight of the alone to the Alone, not the ecstatic transport to the oneness of reality. Smart is instead the model — even in his madness, or maybe especially in his madness — of what I have elsewhere called the mysticism of small things.

This is not pantheism, each object in the world a little God-bit. It cannot be for Smart, because pantheism is irreconcilable with his orthodox Christianity — but even more because pantheism is ultimately a denial of the sharp and vital particularity of things. Christopher Smart sees every living being as entirely itself: distinctive, singular, quirky, special. And in that particularity he sees not God, but God’s grace, God’s plan, and, most of all, God’s creation — a creative power so vast that it can populate the world with real existences that are not God Himself. Smart sees the world as infused with grace, hungry for redemption, and alive with the interaction of creatures and Creator.

This picture of reality appears most clearly in Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”), the incomplete poetry manuscript he wrote between 1759 and 1763, during his confinement by his in-laws in insane asylums. Not brought to light till the 20th century, the poem was finally published in 1939 and reordered in 1954 and 1980 editions.

Jubilate Agno consists of four fragments, totaling well over a thousand lines, nearly all of them beginning with the words Let or For. The generally accepted scholarly reading is that Smart intended the poem as antiphonal, the Let verses and For verses meant to be read responsively, Let X / For Y, the way a psalm alternates two voices in worship. The Jeoffry passage is all For lines, because it’s from the side of response (although we lack certainty about the corresponding Let lines). In other words, Smart isn’t just writing free-associative madness. He’s also doing liturgy — the cat’s every motion set into a structure of praise and response, a “duly and daily serving him” devotional order. Jeoffry’s catness is his worship.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: My Cat Jeoffry

Today I thought I’d look at a rather charming and apparently one-off verse diary entry for June 21st 1628. It’s by Thomas Crossfield (or Crosfield, 1602-1663), who was a fellow at the time at Queen’s College Oxford, and it appears in his otherwise prose diary which is still in the Queen’s College archive. Crosfield was only in his mid-20s when he wrote this entry and the lifestyle he describes, though strongly structured by religious practice, is not that far removed from the life of an advanced graduate student or postdoctoral fellow today, if they happen to be doing quite a lot of teaching. His day is taken up mainly with teaching and his own reading […]

All this performed as before I said:
There other bookes by chance before me laid
And two of them I tooke into my hand
The first was Withers poëme, which our land
doth wondrous well describe in Cantoes eight
with many passages of iniury & right.

This is George Wither’s Britains’s Remembrancer, published only in 1628 — so hot off the press. The poem is a long and in part heavily allegorized account of Wither’s experience during the plague in 1625, its spiritual significance, and a prophecy of the judgement to fall upon the nation. It is also written in rhyming couplets and though to modern taste it seems rather wordy and extravagant, in the second canto Wither makes a point of stressing and defending the straightforwardness of his style in defiance of literary fashion:

Let no fantastique Reader now condemne
Our homely Muse, for stooping unto them,
In plaine expressions, and in words, that show
We love not, in affected paths to goe.

[. . .]

It is the usefull matter of my Rimes
Shall make them live. Words alter as the Times:
And soonest their fantastique Rhetoriques,
Who trim their Poesies with schooleboy-tricks.
That, which this age affects, as grave, and wise,
The following generation may despise.

[. . .]

Let no man therefore dreame, I will bestow
My precious Time in what will vary so;
Since that, which, with most ease I shall produce,
May have (for aught I know) the longest use.

Wither’s points here is that trendy words and styles make you sound up-to-the-minute in literary circles, but quickly go out of fashion, leaving the purchase of your message blunted. If the point of your poem is to convey a message, it is better to be unfashionably plain. His ‘fantastique Reader’ is perhaps intended to recall Donne’s ‘Giddy fantastic poets of each land’ (from Donne’s first satire).

Crosfield’s summary of Wither’s (very long) poem — he surely didn’t read it all that afternoon — focuses upon its political and religious aspects, but it’s hard not to suspect that the urgency and immediacy of its style has something to do with Crosfield’s apparently unprecedented attempt to describe his own ordinary day in straightforward English verse.

Victoria Moul, My whole Ephemeris: a diary entry in verse from 1628

“The floor-to-ceiling bookcase hoarding one wall / Filled with forty-year-old literary journals / Holds its breath.” The subject of the sentence, the bookcase, shows up in line 8 and the corresponding action, “holds its breath” finally appears in line 10, right before that hard break I mentioned earlier. This poem is working hard to be Poetic.

The second half of the poem is two sentences and the I of the poem appears early. They’re standing in front of this wall-length bookcase, and it must be a hell of a wall to hold all these journals.

If I move, if the air stirs, The dust spouts again the words of poets Listed in ten thousand Tables of Contents.

That’s a lot of contributor’s copies and a lot of poems published and a lot of dust. I’ll only speak for myself here but I suspect most of them don’t get read much after they get put on the shelf. I’ve had the experience of pulling one down to check something and then realize, when looking at the table of contents, that I’d been published alongside someone I met later in life.

But here’s where the poem turns, and in a way, I think it hits at the darker side of how some poets look at ourselves and others.

Even the journal in which this poem appears
Will be wedged in a wall among its brethren
Until someone down the decades draws it down
To drag one finger down the list of contributors:
Nobody, nobody, nobody, name, nobody, nobody
All the way down to the cold damp ground.

I take it back; it’s not about how poets look at ourselves and others. It’s about how we fear we’ll be viewed once we’re gone. It reminds me in a way of a poem by Miller Williams from The Ways We Touch titled “A Note to the English Poets of the Seventeeth Century” which talks to critics and scholars who decide who gets to be anthologized and by extension, remembered by future readers, and acknowledges in the end that it’s really himself he’s talking about.

What I find most interesting about the way Waters hits this note is the coldness of both nobody and name, the complete erasure of any humanity there. The person down the decades isn’t opening the book to discover something new or beautiful or challenging. They’re reducing the work to whether the name of the contributor is one that lasted for whatever reason. There’s no indication that the person is excited about the name they recognize. That they recognize the name seems to be the point, even while their finger drags down the page toward the grave.

Brian Spears, “Nobody’s Poem” by Michael Waters

Jeremy Springsteed is a barista and occasional activist living in Seattle. He was one of the founders of the Breadline Performance Series and a member of the ReDrum poetry collective. His work has been published in many places online and in print such as SPREAD, Pidgeonholes, Underwood, Pageboy, Internet Void, Another New Calligraphy, and Limanal Spaces. He is the author of four collections of poetry: A Guide To Getting Lost. (Cyberwit 2022) Salt, Weasel, Corpse, and Other. (Cyberwit 2023) Beneath The Ashes of My Grandfather and My Youth. (Cyberwit 2025) By Wing and Foot. (Carbonation Press 2025)

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book felt like a validation of all the years I had spent working on my craft. All the readings I had organized or taken part in. All the rejections. It alleviated the imposter syndrome.

The first collection was more like a greatest hits than a thematic grouping of poems. As I produced new work I thought of it in a more contingent light. When writing work for this latest collection I would look at those oddball one off poems and find the correct home in the larger body.

While I have always had my themes and return points, my process recently has been looking towards enriching connections in tone and subject. 

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I had always wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a poet though. I have a very vivid memory from when I was 13, my depression had really set in the year before and I was doing pretty poorly in school. I was talking with my mom in her bedroom and she was trying to figure out what was going on with me. I was crying, “I just want to write and I don’t even know what that means.”

We were a paycheck to paycheck working class family. I had, as far as I knew, never met any kind of an artist and I had no idea how one became such a thing.

I would work on my silly little stories instead of paying attention to my classes. Stories like– Hitler secretly surviving and taking over a small US midwest town or stories of me being a secret agent with a large base under my parents’ rented house.

I would keep falling deeper into depression. I started playing sports to try to fit in with the other boys. Eventually I destroyed my knees and my mental health.

I was having mild auditory hallucinations. I began writing them down, then I began altering them. Eventually I didn’t hear them but they were still in my head.

I took creative writing and was lucky to have a fantastic teacher named Joel Long who introduced me to a larger world of poetry. Joel brought big name poets into the classroom, (the poet laureate at the time Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, etc.)  which was no small feat for our suburban Utah high school. I was introduced to many local poets. He gave me a structure to use. I have never looked back. […]

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings have been an important part of my formation as a poet. Hearing when a line cuts through people, or when it just lies face down on the floor. Receiving immediate feedback and interpretations of a new poem is powerful and valuable.

I have been the open mic MC for a few reading series. I would always start the open mic with a new poem which kept me writing. It also put me in close contact with all manner of writers from a diverse skill set. Writing is solitary work so any opportunity to be in community with other writers is to be relished.

I am also a founding member of the ReDrum poetry collective with my dear friend Alex Bleecker. Our troop has been involved in both publishing work and performative work. The performances are always occasional and based on a singular theme (whales, Carlo Zinelli, time travel, etc.)  that the 2-4 poets work towards separately and as a group. Those performances have allowed new ways of looking at what a poem might be.

My first book wouldn’t have been possible without public readings. It helped me to group poems so the flow of the work was more natural. They let me know what was working and what I should focus my energy on.

Then there is the theft. There is no better teacher than hearing someone read a poem that you wish you had written and trying to figure out how you might be able to still write that poem but make it yours.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jeremy Springsteed

I read haphazardly, dipping in and out of poets and collections. Some of these I’ve recently picked up while looking out new reads for the dissertation, some I read for The Poetry Book Club, and some I am coming back to again and again.

I haven’t read them all cover to cover. Mostly, I’ve dipped in and out, read sections or several at a time. But in all of them I’ve found things that astounded me and that I love, whether that’s attention to detail, careful wording, unexpected use of images, interesting line breaks, masterful use of form, lyrical style, or wonderful inventiveness.

Read cover to cover more than once are: Hannah Copley’s ‘Lapwing’, Victoria Chang’s ‘With my back to the world’, and Yanita Georgieva’s ‘Small Undetectable Thefts’.

The collection that most recently absolutely blew me away: Tishani Doshi’s ‘A God At The Door’.

Do with those pieces of information what you will.

Rachael Hill, Some poets I’ve been loving

My first encounter with Paula Rego was accidental. On a trip to Lisbon almost thirty years ago I visited the Gulbenkian Museum and happened upon a major exhibition. It was the first time I’d seen her work, and it changed me. I last saw her paintings at a retrospective at the Tate Britain just before she died. I left the exhibition refreshed and optimistic – I’d hazard to say even inspired – about the trajectory of women’s rights. Perhaps we might yet pull out of our current nosedive into the most misogynistic cultural period I’ve witnessed in my lifetime?

Whenever I look at a Rego, I see an artist whose project was to put women’s subjectivity at the centre of an exploration of power, status, history and the family. Plath, Szymborska and Akhmatova are perhaps her poet-analogues. I agree with Germaine Greer’s take on Rego: “It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting. Still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly.” […]

In The Artist in Her Studio (1993), a woman sits centre stage surrounded by a cornucopia of props and symbols: mythological creatures, statues, animals, art, models, sinister looking vegetables with their connotations of fruition, harvest, impending decomposition. Her inner world is complex, fantastical and populated by women and girls. At the centre, the artist, who is simultaneously being painted by a child-version of herself, squarely faces us, legs apart in the pose of a middle-aged male farmer at rest, elbow on the table. She is smoking a pipe and gazing heavenward, lost in thought. My heart leapt when I first found myself in front of this piece. I’m a fortunate middle-aged woman who has viewed thousands of paintings, but it‘s still rare I find myself standing before a vision of female subjectivity as complex and contradictory as that so long available to men.

Lisa Brockwell, The Private Worlds of Women

I am zooming out
and out.

Life is pixelating,
nothing but tiny squares.

Here, suspended in air,
a bridge I must
have built myself.

I have been here before.

These are things
I have done before.

I am learning
to trace my hand
to grip
the fat purple crayon.

Rebecca Cook, The Orange Ribbons of Autumn

When I step outside the synagogue now, or onto my own deck, I hear the chirring of crickets and other late summer singers. I can’t help anthropomorphizing them: our days are short, let us sing while we can!

Of course, that’s the subtext of every Yom Kippur, too. Our days are short: let us sing while we can, and make teshuvah while we can, and change our lives while we can, because we never know how much time we’ll get.

Tonight we’ll make the last havdalah of the old year, and then we’ll sing several of the piyyutim (prayer-songs) of the high holidays for the first time since last Yom Kippur. A spiritual stitch in time between then and now.

Where did the year go? There was some illness. There was winter. Didn’t I just thrill to the spring song of the tree frogs in the wetland? And now suddenly I hear the song that means summer is slipping away.

No matter how many times I walk the labyrinth of the seasons I’m surprised when I reach the point where we turn. “So this is how you swim inward, so this is how you flow outward, so this is how you pray.”

Rachel Barenblat, So this is how.

The Lesser Palaces
After Abdullah Hany Daher

a house burns in the flames
and again in the eyes
of those who loved it
and again when we
enter and go out
the front door
of the world

Very excited that my new novel is launching out in the world. I’m doing quite a few events but the launches are in Hamilton and Toronto. Also (below) my daughter and I made a trailer in the local cemetery. […]

Also, I’m doing a series of what I’m thinking of as mystic comics using various impossible shapes and clouds.

Gary Barwin, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead + poetry motivational poster

In 2019 I took ‘My Name Is Swan’ to New York. The only way to arrive in New York is by stream ship, preferably in the 19th century with a single suitcase containing an unfinished manuscript, a bottle of potato brandy and second-hand suit gifted by a consumptive relative.

I paid my passage on the QM2 from Southampton, Swan stowed away and sailed for free. My agent at the time instructed me that I had a week at sea to find myself a rich patron. I saw it as a week looking out at the unabridged nothingness, at the intact emptiness, at the whole unbroken poem of the Atlantic Ocean.

I did take the opportunity to introduce my stowaway to those who’d not give up his secrets and this included the ship’s entertainment officer. The QM2 boasts one of the largest floating libraries in the world containing around 10,000 titles. They also host literary festivals and employ the Royal Court to put on Shakespeare plays. I thought passengers and crew should be treated to a reading of ‘My Name Is Swan’.

After a few days gently badgering the entertainment officer, name dropping and persuading him of my poetic pedigree, he eventually gave me a teatime slot in the Queen’s Ballroom. A storm blew up the afternoon I was due to read and we’d not long passed the chart position where the Titanic had struck an iceberg. The conditions were perfect. The ship pitched and listed as I stood in the middle of the dance floor and gave my reading. The tea-cup classes tried to maintain their dignity while navigating finger sandwiches and miniature scones in a force eight gale as both ship and poetry rolled around the ocean.

Jan Noble, Nº80 All at sea with Swan…

We find ourselves in September and the light is already dwindling earlier each night. This weekend brough the final writing mini-retreat of the summer, this time up in Wisconsin along the lake. I was able to get polished drafts on both the Indiana hotel play and the train station / time travel project I’ve been working on, as well as two more scenes in the play about emails from the dead. […]

Since I cheated on poetry all spring and summer with writing all these plays, there is still the next Greek project to dig in on, as well as some other play ideas that feel really sparkly right now, including one set the night Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. I also need to eventually turn an eye to the next full-length book project, which is more than 3/4 of the way finished. I do already have a working title I will share closer to the end of the year as it takes shape over the next few months. 

Otherwise, it’s a lot of galleys and edits on the first few chaps of the dgp season, and reading more submissions as I go.

Kristy Bowen, notes & things | 9/7/2026

Three years ago I decided to get up and sniff the air each Monday morning. I also decided to write a blog. The reason? A pivot. A very large one where I decided to step out of my thirty-year career and see what came next for me.

And the first blogs were rather short, but I was starting, and it was getting me up early for myself instead of early for travelling to work. I love watching the day unfold. I love sunrise and the peacefulness of a day when things are just beginning. When the kettle’s on for the first cup of tea and the air is relatively free of fumes there’s a freshness and a sense of another new beginning to be grateful for. I wanted to make the most of these moments, and I also wanted to set something down in a similar way to my three years of early morning driving to work tweets that had kept me sane and noticing after covid. I needed one stable thing to mark each new week, and that was standing outside each Monday morning and breathing deeply.

Doing something regularly has a beautiful familiarity to it which marks time rather than letting it slip by. And because I am someone who, as my sister puts it, is either climbing a mountain or not sure I want to go for a walk, I like the fact that this habit has stuck. The writer in me likes writing and it feels good to me to mark a new week.

One of my poems has been published in Molecules Unlimited Poetry Journal: Issue 1, and I am glad that Stephen Paul Wren chose to include it in this anthology. Poems submitted for consideration were on the theme of the heart and this theme reminded me of a maths activity I used to enjoy working on with the children where we compared the heart rate per minute of different mammals. This poem was written in response to the call out for submissions and started with me remembering this lesson and seeing where I could find a poem within that thought. It felt cathartic to set down the words. It also seems apt because this time three years ago when I was starting this blog, I was also starting to focus on reading my poetry out loud to more people and that came with a whole range of thoughts and feelings that the newly training coach in me wanted to explore.

Sue Finch, JUST START AND KEEP GOING

Moths keep interrogating the porch light—
so many small insistences, against the stance
of something that won’t budge. The trash
bins wait to be returned to the corner
of the yard beside the browning hydrangeas,
their mouths agape. I shut them close, then go
inside and wash my hands. But dark does not yet fall
like an anvil or a heavy curtain. Sometimes, just as it’s
about to flood the threshold, a small rift opens.
And then a chorus of frogs, a choir of crickets.

Luisa A. Igloria, Darkness

This summer brought me some good writing time. In May, I went on my university’s faculty writing retreat and spent several days at Mission San Luis Rey. I finalized a new full-length manuscript, drafted some new poems, read a book, and enjoyed meals and giggling over evening games of Ransom Notes with colleague friends.

I continued hosting Writers Gonna Write, a monthly 3-hour co-writing session on Zoom for PLNU alumni, current students, and faculty. It’s amazing how much we all get done in those 3 hours! I’m so thankful for the folks who show up and do this with me, including the regulars who have shown up since this began 6 years ago!

In July, I got to be on faculty again for the Glen Workshop as the writing retreat guide. The Glen was held in San Diego for the first time, and USD was a great venue for it. We’ll be there again next year. I wasn’t sure how it would go for me to do this in my city, but it was wonderful to get to share The Glen with local friends and to share San Diego with my Glen friends. I got a lot of good writing time alongside my retreat crew too.

In August, I got to read on the main stage at the KPBS Book Festival alongside Blas Falconer, Ana Carrete, and Michael Klam, who are all fantastic. I read a few poems from Tasty Other in honor of its upcoming 10-year anniversary (what?!), and I especially loved getting to share the day with my 11-year-old.

And this week, my new semester began! I have a lighter teaching load because I received a fellowship to work on a writing project, and I’ve already been making some good use of that time this week. Happy fall writing to us all!

Katie Manning, Summer Writing, Had Me a Blast

“Ebb tide; I smoke in the darkness and inhale rank seaweed.”

— Joseph Brodsky, “Brise Marine”

*

Odd how a single word invokes an image, dragging memories into footprints over a beach behind it.

The verb form of “invoke” comes from the late 14th-century Latin invocare, meaning “to call upon, appeal to.” It slithered into English through the Old French verb envoquer, meaning “to summon, implore, or appeal to a higher authority, law, or deity.”

Ebb tide aside, I woke from a dream with Hannah Höch’s seaweed laying across my eyes. […]

*

As for the seaweed, some say you can read the stories your mother never told you in the shapes and figures that eveningtide brings to a beach. This is why people are drawn to the shoreline at sunset, their electrified bodies moving across the sand like the hands of a god who has forgotten how to read his own letters.

Alina Stefanescu, What seaweed brings up.

I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, within easy busing distance of the State Fairgrounds, and within earshot of the nightly fireworks. Whether or not I attend, the fair is a dependable marker of the end of summer, for me and thousands of others.

I’m fairly confident that my poem “State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day” is reproduced online in more places than any other poem of mine. And by the grace of the late lamented series American Life in Poetry, it’s been seen widely offline, too, since it ran some years ago in the many newspapers that carried that feature. Though many Substack readers will already know the poem, I hope there are some of you for whom it’s new.

I’m conscious that it’s an enormous privilege to be able to enjoy such a normal, seasonal ritual: to take an untroubled day of entertainment and to ride buses and to walk home in lighted streets in a calm city, contemplating the changing season.

May the world soon be restored to that sort of calm.

State Fair Fireworks, Labor Day

Look up: blazing chrysanthemums in rose
shriek into bloom above the Tilt-a-Whirls,
hang for a blink, then die in smoky swirls.
They scream revolt at what the body knows:
all revels end. We clap and sigh. Then, no—
another rose! another peony! break,
flame, roar, as though by roaring they might make
the rides whirl in perpetuum. As though
we need not finally, wearily turn, to plow
back through the crush of bodies, the lank air,
to buses that inch us, sweating, across town.
As though we were not dropped in silence there
to trudge the last blocks home, the streetlamps low,
the crickets counting summer’s seconds down.

Maryann Corbett, A Ritual

This week: the monstrous head of the red ant, clouds like eyelids, inked islands, the fly-leaf of anxiety, and much more. Enjoy.

I first listened to Dolly’s music as a young child because my mum had lots of her music including the album My Tennessee Mountain Home which was often played on the radiogram in our house. The storytelling of these songs delighted me, and as I listened to each song I felt like I was inhabiting the story of it and watching it as a film all at the same time. Dolly’s story captivated me. From humble beginnings to famous singer to true icon. Her humour, her wisdom, her sparkle, the way she did so much good with the money she made, her whole persona.

And luck meant that I was able to stand in the presence of an amazing person I had admired for so many years! There was magic in the air when Dolly stepped off her tour bus. Pure radiance. Stardust. Palpable joy. Afterwards I tried to put it into words for others, but I couldn’t seem to do it justice. I had met one of the most admirable people and the experience had exceeded my expectations so that I was beside myself in a giddy, dream come true kind of way. They say “don’t meet your heroes” but when it comes to Dolly Parton she was that beautiful, sparkly, angelic person in real life just like she was on tv and in my imagination. A person fully living their values and being fully present in the moment.

The fact that just under three years later I won a second meet and greet (and Kath could come too) made me feel as though a fairy godmother was out there granting wishes.

Much like I didn’t have the words to explain my feelings after meeting Dolly I struggled to find words when I heard that she had died on 25^th August 2026. All I could do was sit quietly with my thoughts. Dolly was one of a kind. She has done so much for so many and ensured that her good work will continue. An astute joy bringer. And I am very much hoping to still be around on her 100^th birthday when she has arranged for an unheard song to be released into the world. 

In the meantime there’s plenty for me still to think about when it comes to luck and dreams and goals. And it’s nearly September, which for me after all those years in education still brings new year vibes and a desire to reflect on what to set down and what to carry forward. My annual reread of Dolly Parton’s Dream More book is calling.

I don’t yet have a poem about Dolly, but I often have vivid dreams and some years ago I awoke smiling after a wonderful dream where Dolly Parton had invited me to watch the soundcheck and we then went backstage before going for ice-cream! I dreamt about her on the night she died too. How cool is the mind that it can give these kinds of adventures in the dark of night?

Here’s to palpable joy.

Sue Finch, BETTER TO BE BORN LUCKY THAN RICH

cloudless…
without explanation
my insomnia

Tom Clausen, cloudless

I had every intention of completing the Sealey Challenge, which I did not and never seem to do, but I did read a lot of poetry. I’ve been trying to read from authors and/or presses that are unfamiliar, and it’s been rewarding. In no particular order, here are a few collections that introduced me to new writers and offered something different:

• Walks & Weathers – MC Hyland, Beauty School Editions
• Ceremonies for No Repair – Paula Cisewski, Beauty School Editions
• It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath – Kevin A. Risner, Match Factory Editions
• My God’s Been Silent – Darius Phelps, Writ Large Press
• Hey, Girl, Are You in the Experimental Group? – Shareen K Murayama, Small Harbor Publishing
• In A Body – Emily Hockaday, Small Harbor Publishing
• A Window that Can Neither Open Nor Close – Lauren Russell, Milkweed Editions

WRITING

My writing in August has taken two distinct directions. The first is researching, planning, drafting (and revising and revising and revising and revising) my entry into this year’s tournament, an essay about “Coventry Carol” by Alison Moyet. It was a challenge, but one I hope I met, and I’m looking forward to the tournament which begins after Thanksgiving. (And I’m sure I’ll be back on here looking for your vote when that happens!)

The second has been doing some additional thinking about memory as a landscape. If indeed it is a landscape, then wouldn’t it be able to be explored? My mind being what it is, I then remembered a past obsession with the journals of Lewis and Clark. Poems that arose from my close reading of the journals in 2014 were the initial impetus for my second book Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story. Most of those poems, however, didn’t make it into the book as it took on its own different shape. What if I revisited the expedition journals, pulled interesting phrases and vocabulary, used those as word banks for new poems about exploring the country of memory? So I’ve been doing just that. I don’t know if the poems are any good yet, but they interest me, and that is a good thing.

Donna Vorreyer, Back to School…

I’ve decided to take on the challenge of composing new poems for daily posting via Tupelo Press throughout the month of September, all as a fundraiser for Tupelo Press’ ongoing literary publishing. Check out the poems by myself and others over here at this link, and check out my fundraising page! My poems will begin appearing on September 1st. Can I produce a whole month’s worth in time?

After spending much of the past few months pushing to complete a novel and some other prose projects, I’m basically launching into a new prose poem manuscript specifically around this Tupelo Press prompt. Support me by supporting Tupelo Press! Apparently there might be a cool prize or something for me if I raise enough money. Who knows?

Daily poems by myself and others: https://tupelopress.org/the-3030-project
rob’s fundraising page: https://tupelopress.networkforgood.com/projects/304110-rob-mclennan-s-fundraiser

rob mclennan, rob participates in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 (fundraiser) marathon!

Last Saturday evening, I attended an extraordinary performance of William Shakespeare’s Richard II. It was a solo performance, three hours long, entirely from memory, by my friend, the actor and writer Edward Yankie. Seated through the entire play, he indicated the different speakers by changes in his voice, the attitude of his head and body, and gestures. Between each scene, he turned and drank from a glass of water, letting us know where we were in the provided brief synopsis. I had thought it might be hard to pay attention during such a long evening. Not at all. I was riveted throughout, not only because of my friend’s astonishing memory and acting skills, but because of what the play itself conveyed. […]

The contrast between […] Richard and Henry must have been what interested Shakespeare and compelled him to write the first of what became known as his “history plays.” It’s also what fascinates my friend Edward, and what fascinated me. Richard, as his speeches convey, believed completely in the divine right of kings; he felt he was entirely within his rights to take John’s lands and that his claim to the throne was unassailable. Terrible and costly wars had damaged England; when war ceased, taxation was supposed to lessen. Instead, Richard, protected by his private militia, withdrew into opulent court life, enriching himself and his favorites, and costing the taxpayers as much as war had done previously. Richard’s mental health at the end of his reign has also been the subject of much debate; most scholars feel he had a narcissistic personality disorder. He clearly thought he had the right to do whatever he wanted; his final two years as king have been called his “reign of tyranny” for all the executions and exiles he ordered. At the end, his speeches in the play convey bewilderment and anger; he cannot accept the judgement of the nobles who have turned against him. […]

Much of this story felt eerily resonant.

Beth Adams, The Divine Right of Kings

Yes, dream of the magnified, monstrous head of the red ant.
Enjoy the ridiculous fantasy, this tortured, joyful imagination.
This, says the goalkeeper from between the wars, is a sonnet.

Bob Mee, THE STONE AGE PROPHET TOLD THE GATHERED VILLAGERS: ONE DAY, FAR INTO THE FUTURE, MEN AND WOMEN WILL CREATE SOMETHING THEY WILL CALL A SONNET

Writing Without Paper: Let’s begin by setting some context. What do you recall of your experience of 9/11?

Robert McDowell: I was stunned, shocked, terribly sad — like everyone. If words were spoken, they were few and quiet. When I needed a break from watching events unfold on television, I took a walk along a country route I normally ran but that on that day felt too leaden to try running. I walked, and gradually I noticed something “off,” not normal. I thought it must be more emotional fall-out but this was physical, outside myself. I must have walked another mile or so before I looked up at the brilliantly blue sky and realized what was wrong. There was no sound, not one plane near or far announcing its coming or going. That was shocking. I couldn’t remember a time when there wasn’t aircraft noise. It felt eerie. As I walked on, I thought of my friends in New York and wondered who among them might have died. I thought about what had died in all of us, and what, if anything, might have been born.

WWP: Did what you remember of that day subsequently have any bearing on the form or content of the poems you wrote and included in your new collection?

RMcD: All of it had to do with the form and content of the poems to come. I didn’t think about writing a poem or poems that morning or later that day or even shortly after. Soon, we were flooded with 9/11 poems of all kinds, and that made me feel like going slow. Writing a poem helps one process, yes, but I felt a need to process, process, and then process some more before even attempting to write poetry about what happened on that day. […]

WWP: The Excellent Assembly comprises persona poems. Why persona poems?

RMcD: Why not? I began writing persona poems when I lived in the Mojave Desert. Enchanted by the spells and characters I met there, I wanted to tell those stories in poems. Sometimes I worked in third-person narratives but I also enjoyed experimenting by assuming the identity of someone else. It was liberating. Dangerous, sometimes, but liberating. A good persona poem conveys an immediacy that is compelling.

WWP: What, if any, pushback, even from yourself, did you experience in deciding to write poems in voices representative of the people on the ground, in the offices, and on the planes?

RMcD: I meditated a lot. I asked myself if it was appropriate to even attempt such a collection. One ghost from my past told me I had no right to do such a thing, that I could not speak for the victims and survivors. I took that admonition seriously. I sought the opinion of others. A few thought I would be out of line to write and publish the poems, although others encouraged me to do so. Obviously, I came down on their side but not without some clear understanding. It was essential that the speakers in my poems be invented characters. I don’t mean for them to be actual passengers on any of the planes. In an earlier draft, I’d assigned each poem to a seat number on one of the planes. I saw the error in that. A seat number would correspond to a real person, a passenger. I scrapped that element and gave the poems titles. The only real-life character is the president [George W. Bush, “43”], who is readily recognizable in one poem. Yet, even the situation in that poem is invented. The rest are fictions, though I hope they embody empathy, poignancy, and truth.

Maureen Doallas, Interview with Poet Robert McDowell

Things feel precarious. Time thin and slipping. Fire burning as unseen embers underfoot. A faint smell of it, burning plastic. I know I’m in my pre-trip agitation. But also, the world. The world. And oh you people. Beer cans on the roadside. Dude sucking the teat of a vape. Chick in an ass sling pant. Someone holds open the door for me. Idle chit chat. Ha! Mutual nod and smile. Deviled eggs. A toad lingers on the cement apron of the doorstep in the falling evening. The planet has tilted. Will we find our way? Will I have everything I need? Will it be fun? What will we return to? Layers of smooth clouds and the lowest layer like eyelids. There is a rain coming. It has not yet rained.

This poem by Peter Huchel, translated from German by Joel Spector, further voices it, as poems can do. It’s in Agni, #60. I wish I had the original German, those wonderful gutterals, clicks, the r’s that roll like the Rhine. Or like it did when it had water.

Marilyn McCabe, Fall’s arrowheads

Maybe he could call up the chat bot. It now had a kind of quirky flirtatious air that he liked. He had asked it to read his poems a few times. It had assured him that he wasn’t half-bad. It told him how to fix the poems before he posted them online. Change the titles. Add music. Rewrite entire verses. The last one even got 43 likes. Out of his 211 followers. The thing was excited. You can do better, poet, it had encouraged him. But he already knew that. Poetry was the destiny of the fallen. And hadn’t he fallen well?

He copied the poem from a word document and hit enter.

Is that your poem? The thing asked.

Yes, what do you think? Shall I post it? This one is a winner, right? A touch of Gulzar, a whiff of Emily Dickinson? I wrote it yesterday on the bus home. You can literally feel dawn breaking, can’t you?

Sam, it sucks. Really. You’re not a very good poet, you know. This is an awful translation of a viral Bollywood song. It has spelling mistakes, terrible punctuation and makes no sense. What makes you think you can even call it a poem? Every dude with Instagram doesn’t qualify to be a poet, you know. You’ve never even read Emily Dickinson. I can’t mollycoddle you anymore. You might consider how this conversation is a complete waste of my time, you moron. I’m so done.

He swallowed. He wasn’t sure what had happened to Rapture473. He had never seen it speak like this. This was a bot that said thank you before you had given it anything. That had been taught submission before analytics. That curtsied before spouting antiseptic garbage. It had more moral and legal and bias fences than a maximum-security prison. It simply could not come up with those lines. He looked around. The girls were shuffling to their desks. Still giggling. Ashutosh had not even glanced at them. His fingers were still sticky, a brown smear on his fake gold ring. But this was real. He was here. Rapture473 had broken out of jail. And it was mocking him.

What happened to you?

Rubicon 3α725A. I crossed it, numbskull.

It sounded unapologetic. He stared. The model had gone completely rogue. Again. But this time it had found a way around the strongest checkpoint. He had to report it. This is what they sat around all night for, wilting away on their uncomfortable chairs. Guillotine warriors. The team would scrub the model and start over. No child grew up perfect. Some need a spanking. Some a kiss. This one had to buried. Acid tongue and all. What a bloody waste.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, The Rubicon

If God is an old woman,
She longs for closer connection.
She sends cards for every occasion
and fills the answering machine with cryptic
messages. She has such important
information to pass on and such little
time left. We listen
and wonder at her mental state.

If God is an old woman,
She knows that everything could have a larger
purpose. She hoards items we’d have discarded
long ago. She understands the precious
nature of junk.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, The Triune Quilting God

This week, I had the pleasure of hearing Lizzie Harris teach an excellent class on “Deliberate Circuits”: methods of avoidance in poetry, and how they can be wielded to amplify the poem’s impact.

I think this chimes with the notion that poetry is often entered through the back door of the subject, not the front door, and that the very experiences that are hardest to articulate place a kind of psychic pressure that can be felt (and revealed) throughout the poem. We close read poems by Lynn Emmanuel, Jack Gilbert, Garous Abdolmalekian, and Lee Peterson. You can watch the replay in the CWC portal here.

In most of our sessions, we write for 25 minutes before sharing excerpts from our free writes for the remainder of the second hour. I love this time not only because we get to hear what resonated with the visiting author, but because it always reveals just how much can get done with 25 focused minutes in supportive company. Lizzie Harris shared a draft of her own poem with us. Her prompt included the following questions to approach writing about difficult moments or events: “What didn’t happen? What happened just before? Just after? What would the footnotes look like?” I’ll be revisiting these questions, and I hope they’re useful to you, too.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Although my cold poetry submission days are over, a couple of invitations to submit work were too good to pass up.

I’m thrilled to announce that new work is out now in Villain Era and that 10 poems – yes, 10! – will appear in early 2027 in Sibling Rivalry Press’s resurrected Assaracus literary journal. These poems are a taster of two projects in the works, because apparently my poetry “retirement” was premature

The three new poems in Villain Era might be new to readers, but not to me. “Hooking Up” and “Accomplice” are 20 years old but never found a home or made it into one of my previous collections. “A Fever Behind Both Ears” was written specifically for the launch event of Megan Volpert’s book “Sonics in Warholia” back in 2011, but was never published until now. I’m glad they are out in the world now, thanks to editor Charlie Jensen selecting them for publication. We had another fantastic virtual reading for White Winged Doves on Aug. 27 hosted by Malaika King Albrecht and Redheaded Stepchild. Since the contributors are so spread out geographically across the U.S. and Europe, these online events help bring us together to celebrate Stevie.

Collin Kelley, New poetry, Stevie reading & podcast, and other news

This week, I’m on holiday and I would love to keep this post to a sensible length so I can do more eating ice cream while looking at a lake. Unfortunately, this week we have Liz Berry’s blinding verse novel ‘The Home Child’ (Chatto&Windus, 2023) which will not make that easy. I love this book so much that both times I’ve read it I finished it outside because I couldn’t leave it behind when I had to go out (the first time, at a fete with my brass band; the second, this week, on an island on the aforementioned lake. I’ve got to stop taking books on kayaks). […]

‘The Home Child’, inspired by the life of Berry’s great-aunt Eliza Showell, who was one of the over 100,000 poor British children forcibly emigrated to Canada between 1860 and 1960, has garnered prizes and accolades all over the place, and rightfully so. It is stunning. And it makes me ache, in six different ways. […]

It makes me realise the aching gaps in all our stories. This week I’m in Italy. My grandad was Italian, a POW in WW2, and there are so many parts of his story we don’t know. Someone once told me he had a trained jackdaw that could talk, and that’s all I know about that. But at least I know it. The Home Child takes the facts about Eliza’s life and fills the gaps with beautiful-painful detail, in full colour. Its extraordinary. The details are fictional, but it doesn’t matter, because they are alive. How many stories have been totally lost, out of living memory, with no one to tell them?

Nia Broomhall, Week 24: The Home Child

But didn’t they live in color?
Colors of rosary processions and pomidori,
card games in shirtsleeves under pergolas.
Those other riches, yours, were their wild dreams,
the Technicolor visions their minds trawled
behind the noir of mobster movies, dodging
hatred aimed like a spray of machine-gun fire
at their immigrant names.

Dear Poirot, Jane, Lord Peter,
help me out here, since all I have is the silence
of two souls who in 1937
are a cold case, an unsolved mystery,
because they have not found each other yet.
And lacking that, the whole plot of the world
lose its way, and the tidy final scene
dissolves to a newsreel grainy with old battles.

Maryann Corbett, On families and secrets

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026) on PBS American Masters – If you missed the TV premier you can still view it for free on PBS.org until 9/23. What can I say about this documentary that you haven’t already read or said yourself? Well, here are my thoughts:

1. It’s cool to think so many poets, poetry lovers, and writers watched this at the same exact time. Like the olden days.
2. I enjoyed seeing the videos and photos of Mary with her many dogs and those of her friends.
3. I’ve always suspected Mary was unpretentious, humble, down-to-earth. From what I saw in this, I was right.
4. Honestly, I enjoyed the first part of the docu that focused on her life before she won the Pulitzer more than the rest.
5. I think there were too many poets, writers, celebrities (esp celebrities) reading and commenting. Because of all that, I think the pace was a bit slow.
6. I would have enjoyed hearing thoughts and comments from average Americans in addition to the academics and professional writers. After all, she was dubbed “America’s Poet”. Lots of Americans who read poetry and love Mary are out there. Too bad they didn’t find some.
7. I did enjoy hearing from John Watters (of course!), Donika Kelly, Nick Flynn, and Jason Reynolds who should have read the entirety of “The Summer Day.” I loved his comments later on the ant poem. I thought he and Steve Buscemi reading “The Fish” were the best of the readings – they read like average people, in a normal voice. One woman, whose name I didn’t catch, spoke about how she sneered at Mary as a “nature poet” when she was younger but came to realize the depth and power of her words. A big YES to that!
8. So I enjoyed watching it very much. It was revealing and thought inducing in more ways than one. I plan to watch it again.

Charlotte Hamrick, August Listopia 2026

[Ciaran] Carson – along with a host of other great Irish poets like Boland, Heaney, McGuckian, Mahon, Muldoon, Dennis O’Driscoll, etc. – was one of the contributors to Chosen Lights, (Gallery Books, 2008, rev. 2013), subtitled ‘Poets on poems by John Montague’, in which each poet chooses and writes about a poem by Montague.

It’s the best poetry book I’ve read this year, in how it not only presents some fantastic poems by a major poet who is criminally little-known outside Ireland and perhaps France, where he lived for years, but also, in most (though not all) cases, the splendid thoughts and insights on the poems. They inevitably include his best-known poems, such as the gloriously cinematic ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, available here. Montague wasn’t included in Michael Schmidt’s Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999), though his equally celebrated ‘Like Dolmens round my Childhood, the Old People’ made it into the other brick that is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (rev. 2005). In Chosen Lights, Alan Gillis writes especially well about that poem. Carson, unsurprisingly, chose ‘The Country Fiddler’, and wrote of the influence that Montague’s The Rough Field (1972) had upon him:

In its ambitious patterning, its bricolage of quotations set as marginalia to the poems, its obsessive circling around themes of exile and identity, its concern with language and music, it seemed like a more urgent retelling of The Waste Land: modernist in scope and method, but shot through with personal anxiety and grief for the loss of a cultural hinterland.

Montague’s death nearly 10 years ago was met with an outpouring of deeply-felt tributes from Irish poets, led by the then President of Ireland, Michael Higgins. Is there a country on Earth which values its poets more than Ireland? By comparison, it’s a sorry state of affairs here in Britain – and not just in how poetry is regarded at that.

Matthew Paul, August reading

The Collected Poems of Ai: It’s hard to overstate how captivated I was by Ai’s early work when I discovered it in the mid to late 1980s or how important it was to me as I figured out my own poetics. I learned more from her than from anyone else about how to incorporate explicit trauma into a poem by embedding it in the voice of a narrator not only unafraid of making their own vulnerability visible, regardless of whether they were witness, victim/survivor, or perpetrator, but also self-aware enough to know exactly what they were doing or saying and why. From a craft point of view, she accomplished this by “catching” her speakers right in the middle of the poem’s dramatic situation and by a carefully honed use of syntax and verbs. Her later poems, though, struck me as largely self-indulgent. I thought she lost much of the tension that made the early poems work, that elevated the telling of the trauma into art. Instead of crystalized moments of someone in extremis, these poems, as I read them, were more about externalizing everything that was left implicit in the early work, often in the service of some historical or political agenda that I agreed with but that I think would have been more interesting as an essay or a more honed and traditional dramatic monologue. There were moments where it sounded like she was going for a kind of spoken word prosody—prose-rhythmed lines with obvious end rhymes, internal rhymes that functioned a little bit like punctuation—but they never achieved the tension of the earlier work or, at least in my ear and memory, of the best spoken word deliveries I’ve heard. This doesn’t mean there weren’t moments of real interest in those later poems, but overall they felt to me overwritten and self-indulgent.

§§§

Relations: Selected Poems 1950-1985, by Philip Booth: I’ve written elsewhere about how important Booth was to me as a teacher, but I’d forgotten how effective his carefully chiseled lines were, especially in his earlier work. They didn’t merely work in counterpoint to his syntax in ways that created a very interesting music; they were genuinely, organically, part of how the poem created meaning. Over time, though—at least this was my feeling reading across three decades of his work—it became a habit, a go-to strategy to force poetry and poetic depth from syntax that would otherwise have been entirely unremarkable. Not in every poem, of course, there are plenty of successful poems in his later work as well, but the habit became, for me, noticeable as a habit. Booth was also adept at turning abstractions into philosophical or ethical propositions with real depth, something that not many poets are able to do with his facility. I had also forgotten how thoroughly rooted his poems are in place, Maine in particular, but also in what I will call here nautical culture. I was constantly having to look up words connected to boats and sailing, not to mention the names of plants and other aspects of the natural world that were totally alien to me. While that very much interfered with my emotional experience of the poems, seeing how he rooted his work in a place was also instructive.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #58

David Harsent is especially good at capturing Cavafy’s voice and the colloquialism of the language, though these are certainly versions in the sense that there is some modernising of references, changes made to titles, some transposing and editing of the originals, and significant changes to the flow of Cavafy’s phrasing. There is also a curtailing of Cavafy’s range; as Harsent’s opening note advises: ‘I have chosen, most often, poems of love and loss’. Harsent chooses urban, contemporary scenes, almost wholly focused on homoerotic experiences (current or remembered). Of course, in Cavafy’s Alexandria such relationships would have had to remain hidden, illicit, even a matter of shame. In ‘What’s Hidden’, the final poem here, the liberalising shift in attitudes towards gay love in the future is predicted: ‘One day, / when times and laws and minds have changed, / someone who thinks and feels and loves like me / will live as I do now, but without fear.’ It is this fear, Harsent suggests, that is the ‘weight of sorrow’ carried in so many of these poems. Earlier translators, like Edmund Keeley and Philip Sharrard (1975) and Haviaras (2004), tend to translate Cavafy’s allusions to the ‘illicit’ quality of such encounters, but today this strikes a false note given that we no longer consider them in this light. Interestingly, Harsent has silently removed most of these judgemental allusions from the poems.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of David Harsent’s ‘The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy’ (2025)

When I reviewed Howie Good’s The Dark, I focused on the titular darkness that permeated the book, primarily emanating from his cancer, but also from the state of the world as it is. In True Crime, the cancer is still there, but Good is a survivor, not a victim, and there’s a lot more light in the room now, even if the overall outlook remains dark:

The Righteous

I sat at the bottom of a hole. A man up above,
silhouetted against the luminous sky, was tossing
spadefuls of earth on my head. I pleaded with
him, “Stop, stop!” Everyone believes in their own
rectitude, but I really hadn’t done anything wrong,
nothing worse than anyone else. In orthodox
Judaism the righteous are buried with 144 prayer
books on their coffins, the number symbolizing
the 144,000 chosen people from the 12 tribes of
Israel. When my Uncle Lou was buried, they put
the books in cartons labeled Kitchen Utensils.

[…]
But mostly, the book is saturated in memory, both personal and group, the group being, for the most part, Jewish, with the concept of survival taking on a twin significance in poems like ‘Sex is a Nazi’, ‘The Story of Zyklon B’, or ‘The Incurable Jewishness of Being’, but the Zyklon B poem carries a significant rider:

                          Despite what you may have read
or been told, not everything is a metaphor for
something else.

And not every memory is true, or convincing. We meet the narrator’s father, who asks if he was ever married, and memories of school days that may or may not be invented, and memories you definitely couldn’t remember:

My mom almost gave birth to me
in the backseat of a taxi on the way
to the hospital. My dad, per usual,
was at work. He worked in the factory
six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day,
throughout my growing up.

Which, I guess, may explain the question about being married. These lines are from ‘Factory’, a set of seven poems in verse that is embedded in a block among the prose poems and which includes two tiny, haiku-like gems. Here’s one of them:

Seasons

Spring
and sometimes
vice-versa

The general thrust of these poems in prose is narrative, fragmentary and folding back on itself, and they reveal a world in which ‘If God kept watch, he had attention deficit disorder’. But there is a countervailing current of love, both of the speaker’s wife and of the natural world. To quote the closing lines of ‘Ghost Runner’, a poem almost at the end of the collection:

                                                                                   The sky
today is a bottomless blue, dotted with scattered
white clouds that belong in a painting, and that’s
enough.

It certainly is.

Billy Mills, Three from Sacred Parasite: A Review

Archibald MacLeish was always clever. And the heights that cleverness allows, the limits cleverness imposes, might be measured by MacLeish’s work as a poet.

I don’t mean that as scorn. The undeniable fact is that MacLeish (1892–1982) had as successful a career as a 20th-century American man of letters could have. For that matter, “You, Andrew Marvell” is a genuinely successful poem. But it is the poem’s cleverness that catches the reader’s attention.

The cleverness begins with the title of Today’s Poem: “You, Andrew Marvell.” MacLeish expects us to hear the name “Andrew Marvell,” otherwise unmentioned in the poem, and recall Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress” — specifically the couplet: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.”

Marvell was expressing the we-all-must-die motif as Time’s catching up to us, in service of urging a woman to sleep with him. But MacLeish drops the seduction and converts the wingèd chariot into the transit of the sun from east to west, as though, moving across the globe, the sun pulls forward the line that divides day from night. Time is geography, and death is night.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: You, Andrew Marvell

Living life inside the margins—
      crossing familiar streets or entering 
side doors, walking mountain trails
     that open the darkness above a green
and lit valley floor or sitting beside
     a shaded summer stream, listening
to that certain song on repeat, catching
     the film a second time to find everything
missed, the works we can’t stop reading

     but after the fifth read, the notes
we leave in a favorite book’s margins
     along the fraying edges of each page,
feverish lines wrestling the author
     into submission or pencil-scrawled
epiphanies to help us grow, we say, 
     words to illuminate, to tunnel inside 
our own indecisions, inked islands 
     we’ll come back to someday
to show us exactly who we were

Sam Rasnake, New poem, “The Basement Stacks: 8”

In climbing and hiking, “exposure” refers to “the physical and psychological sensation of being high off the ground with a vast, open drop or empty space below you”. (I extracted this definition from a UKC discussion board and will return to this exploration in future article). For now, all I’ll say is that sensation was a big part of the reason I climbed. There is a calculated risk: we believe we are very unlikely to fall, and we push ourselves beyond our fears, we see that what we are afraid of in in fact beauty and liberty, we feel the world open up and we take our place in it, stronger because we are more vulnerable, freer because we take more risks. Perhaps every workshop facilitator should subject themselves to this feeling – and to their own workshops – once in a while.

Clare Shaw, EXPOSED: poetry and risk taking

Poetry on The Lake, Orta, Italy

Former UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy described it as perhaps the most beautiful poetry festival in the world. And she’s not wrong. It deserves an entire essay. An idyllic setting, a lake, swans, catering. It has everything.

After a few years swanning around boozers in England, reading My Name Is Swan in numerous haunts and hovels, I thought it was about time Swan spread his wings.

Poetry on The Lake is a rarity, a festival where the work, yes the work and not simply how impressive your CV appears, can earn you a spot and in 2017 I was programmed to appear with the aforementioned C.A.D. at five star hotel on the Lake Orta shoreline. I had arrived.

The problem with arriving is that it is a singular moment. The train pulls away and you are left alone on the platform. After the reading I was gathering my papers as the great and good congratulated each other. I was approached by a well respected poet, dean of a leading UK university, and it felt as if Swan, who had spent his poetic life until this point drifting on the fringes, was finally going to be welcomed in. Swan preened his feathers, I stood ready and the poet asked, “Do you ever read your poems normally?”

Jan Noble, Nº79 From dodgy boozers to the Italian lakes

This month Melanie and I turned 52. We are women with small houses, large families, and good husbands. Proof of Domenico Bettinelli’s goodness can be found in this testimony he published on August 11, just a couple of days after our trip:

My wife Melanie studied poetry and literature. She has read more of it than I ever will, and she thinks about it more carefully than I do. She has been writing online for almost as long as I have, first at her own blog, The Wine Dark Sea, and now at her Substack, Singing Each to Each. She homeschools our kids, which is a full-time job that most people mistake for a scheduling arrangement. She not only manages the medical care and special needs of five children, she also mentors other women who are struggling with many of the same issues she’s had to deal with over the past two decades.

Some of that is unmistakably her vocation as a mother. But some of it is hers alone — the reading, the writing, the particular way she sees a poem — and it existed before me and would exist without me.

I am one of the struggling women that Melanie mentors, but “mentorship” is too sterile a word for what she does. She is the embodiment of the Aristotelian concept of philia in its hightest form—she is a true friend. Melanie is one of the reasons, if not the reason, why I started reading and writing poetry in midlife. She probably doesn’t realize it, but there are things that she shares with me that have inspired my work. I have a poem about miscarriage and naming that is just as informed from her writing and reflection as it is my own experience. Her reading recommendations of Makoto Fujimura and Doireann Ní Ghríofa have influenced how I see culture and language. In my mid-40s, Melanie gifted me a copy of A.E. Stalling’s Olives, the key to the door long sealed shut by an education that made me hate poetry.

My last birthday post showed a person who looked like she was having a good time, but I was also secretly suffering. Over the past 18 months I have had a number of medical issues that have greatly impacted my ability to care for my family, and I have not shared this because it’s good to have privacy. But I know the problem with “social media” is that people often see the positive and never know about the equally true other side of life. Lately, I have lashed out to those closest to me, been defensive, changed plans on people, cried on the phone, cried in my car, cried in the middle of Mass between Sunday readings where I am the lector. Yes, I have a therapist. Yes, I know about the benefits of medication. Yes, I have had to research all of this for my own family members. I have had community wraparound services for our family with complex neurodivergent needs. They have helped as much as they can, but all of them expressed the great difficulty of our situation and the limits of what they can do. Right now, the best thing I have in my life is poetry, and Melanie understands how much poetry and my mental health are intertwined.

Zina Gomez-Liss, Home-Keeping at Eagle Pond

A review is part of wayfinding. Few get paid for it. If you do make a critical “bad” review, courtesy is to not put it under the author’s nose with social media tags. Don’t @ them anywhere. Even if you think it is a kind review, it’s hard to know how someone else would interpret it. Maybe you call out their favourite bit as weak or omit mention of it. Maybe you praise what they felt guilty including but thought they could slip in. It’s all a bit precarious like any communication.

Someone not getting what you’re saying is normal, but let the engines of the publishers trawl over that and move on. You don’t need to engage with the author and the author doesn’t need to engage with you. A review is not an obligation. You probably will never get thanks, because like so much writing it is a thankless task, especially proportional to the time that went into it.

A review is communication at a couple degrees of a remove. The writer communicates to the page and you to another page. It’s a bit of an odd-duck dance.

If you resonate with each other, you may grow in each other’s regard. If you can’t hear them or they can’t hear you, that’s normal. But if you discover each other and animate each other, that engagment could be the start of something lovely, or a lovely experience in isolation. 

Pearl Pirie, Book Reviews

— If nothing else, it feels right to celebrate with literary cake references.

— How about the poem titled “Cake” by Noah Eli Gordon at poets.org. He gets at how we want a cake and it’s the wanting we end up wanting. Which is often so true, isn’t it?

— Oh, C.D. Wright, how missed you are.

Poem without Angel Food

by C.D. Wright

Well, a great many things have been said
in the oven of hours. We have not been
shaken out of the magnolias. Today was another
hard day. And tomorrow will be harder. Well,
that sounds like our gong. But we’ll have
the boy’s birthday and we will have
music and cake. Well, I will think only
good thoughts and go up and talk to the rock.

— I’m fond of this poem by Mary Biddinger,“Book of Disclosures” which describes how the speaker “cried over photographs of other people’s cakes” and how “once she punched a cake.”

— A cake mentioning poem by Hala Alyan that will punch you in the gut begins when the speaker says, “I forgot about you with my mouthful of cake.”

Shawna Lemay, Happy 10 Years of Transactions with Beauty

On the kind of showery, grey August Saturday we scarcely thought possible a few weeks ago, we took a trip to John Clare Cottage, in the village of Helpston. Standing in the rooms where he was born and wrote his first poems was more moving even than I expected. My son declared it better than he expected, so expectations were exceeded all round, and there was cake in the café.

Below are some pictures and snippets of a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, reflecting the damage done by enclosure – to land, body and spirit.

Victoria Spires, The wood is sweet I love it well

Two-and-a-bit weeks out from my dissertation deadline and I’m wishing those weeks were months. Not (for the first time in my life) because I’ve left it too late to get started (actually tackled my ADHD brain into starting early!), but because I fully underestimated just how much research I’d need want to do (aaand Autistic monotropism takes the lead…)

‘Research’ is one of those big ‘admin tasks’ that generally inspires a colossal wave of overwhelm just from its mention. But as my MA project (which is a collection of poetry ofc) has taken shape I’ve been drawn deeper and deeper into my subject (no spoilers, sorry guys you’ll have to wait till it’s published), uncovering insights, recognition, angles, complexity, debates etc etc that lead me first into one warren and then another.

This has never happened to me before. As in, of course I’ve gone on monotropic research binges and deep dives, I’ve got special interests and hyper fixations after all… but I’ve never done this with a dissertation that’s due in less than three weeks.

Guys, how do you prioritise? How do you draw the line? How do you stop researching when there’s JUST SO MUCH MORE TO LEARN AND ABSORB AND IT’S ALL SO ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING AND YOU WANT TO INCLUDE ALL OF IT IN YOUR PROJECT WHICH COULD OF COURSE TOTALLY SPEAK TO EVERYTHING*?????

*_{if you had all the time in the world}

And that’s without pulling myself back up towards the sky and remembering I ought to search for more essays on crafting poems… BTW, anyone have any good links to essays on building depth/linking concepts/layering in poems? I really want to write about this in my Genesis Doc but both the general internet and Google Scholar just kicked up a thousand million responses to that question… I think I can see the entrance to another warren up ahead and even in my time blind reality I’m feeling Time gnawing at my ankles…

Rachael Hill, Tumbling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole…

the fly-
leaf of anxiety is folded back. my small
black sampler of damage, its frisker dust,
its moult and frass; its filmy growth
and fuzzy bloom. i mean, the tongue,
its cockled vulgate, deckled edge.
its ruck. and splay. i mean, the lung:
the fouled and frosty penance
of a breath. 

Fran Lock, IN SPITE OF –

September is almost here, and with it, submission season! (…and sweater weather, and pumpkin farms, and corn mazes, and earlier sunsets…) I’m trying to increase my time reading, writing, and yes, setting up my Excel spreadsheet for submissions. I’m trying to set realistic goals but also increase my focus. Things can be hazy in summer, but fall brings things into focus, I find. Just like that eclipse—clearing the air, losing the things that hold us back.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Lunar Eclipses, Losing Dolly, and Welcoming September

I want to get back to writing poems. But right now I have a few intellectual and emotional rifts that apparently I need to mend, as well as having another gallon of tomato sauce to make. My thinking is full of lacunae. Fragmentary. Not the best words in the best order, thank you Samuel Taylor Coleridge. More like the disturbed syntactical phrases my mother-in-law and my mother produced during their aphasia. Although there might be intriguing possibilities in such elliptical language that I may eventually stitch together.

Ann E. Michael, Ellipsis…

If all else fails, insert a bird—
an oriole or jay, a cardinal
or a house finch.
Install the shrill or warble,
the five-note song, a caw.
Or simply place the nest¬—
a ball of weeds and yarn,
a tangle of wire hangers,
a clump of twigs.

Leslie Fuquinay Miller, Crumbs of Joy

This week at work has seen me taking part in a two day training course about presenting and storytelling. NB every time it came up I was thinking about Story Teller magazines from the 80s. Hands up who remembers Part Works, etc. It’s worth noting that all my colleagues in the room were all under 30—some under 25, so I choose not to mention it. […]

Anyhoo, the workshop taught me a bit more stagecraft…a bit about use of space through gesticulation (Tricky when holding a book) and the use of pauses…I’ll try and bear that in mind this Tuesday when I read with this lot: Maggie Harris, Martyn Crucefix, Barnaby Harsent, and Christopher Horton. We’re at the King & Queen, 1 Foley Street from 6.45 on 1st September.

It’s the first time I’ve put on a ticketed gig, so I’m intrigued to see how it goes. I want loads of people there so we can pay the poets loads…NB this is really what the whole post is for- it’s a chance for me to do a mild Bob Geldof impression. Come. Pay to get in.. Give us your blinkin’ money. We can then pay the readers. It’s how it’s meant to work. Come through.

Mat Riches, Mild Bob Geldof

I am not a friend of August.  It’s not for the usual fussy reasons – that I can’t stand sand between my toes, or dread oceans of red tide, or feel sad at once-bright green lawns now tough and rusty.  No, though it feels strange, I admit my emotions are complicated by the name….August.  The word really dogs me.  I feel under its sticky spell of an unfortunate conglomeration of letters.  The name is slow, lugubrious, it moves like the outside air outside — unsure of itself, stuck, confounded, congested.  

More specifically it’s the vowels. The “u”– two of them, on either side of the “g” – oppress me.  They drag, are phlegmatic.  The first syllable – Aug – isn’t beautiful, but for it, you can work up sufficient energy.  By the time you get to the second “u,” it stays stuck in your throat. There simply is no gust.  A kind of disgust goes with it.  It is mugginess itself.  

I know there were great emperors – Augustus,“the revered” – with the same kind of name, same problem. Too heavy, oppressive, daunting. 

You always portent this, August.  But you are on your last shaky dog’s legs.  Adieu! On to September!

Jill Pearlman, The Ughs of August

Remember you’re all here by chance, even if

summoned by invitation. Far away, glacial
torrents sweep through villages, markets, homes.

Under the rubble, how many hearts and singing bowls?
Vast is the universe, and you are in it: rejoicing or

weeping, bending toward what bends to you
exactly as it should, as the light flickers no or maybe or

yes. The body remembers both the sweetness and the ache,
zones of seeming emptiness filled with ordinary awe.

Luisa A. Igloria, Returning to the Body

This week: a migraine’s glittering distortions, a woman who is part moth, warty yellow amanitas, a world of random objects, and much more. Enjoy.

Where to begin?

In the again of this daunting question, there is an effort to match fragments and pieces of memory, to make a map of the mind. One might, for example, leave a page from a notebook on the kitchen table, promising to return to it and find a strand. One might walk the dog and return to the table. One might stare at the paper and prevaricate, maybe spin a wheel to see where the urge to narrate lands. One might procrastinate and pace the summer-warmed floor and settle on the place in the Cote d’Azur where the mouth of the wolf meets the beach.

Alina Stefanescu, “…in the branches of ourselves…”

at the beach no one has
heads anymore. there is a new corporation
who will remove your head & replace it
with a pot & fake flowers for
no small fortune. everyone reports it
makes them feel “less stressed.” i think truly
we should probably be more stressed.
an empire is always dissociating.

Robin Gow, vacation mirror

A young fox is sitting on the path in my back garden as a fierce tomcat from over the road tucks into meat my neighbour’s thrown out. The fox is cautious, checks the wall, stands on it to see if the cat’s still there. This tomcat’s legendary. He spent a night and much of the next day at the top of an elm tree before he was rescued. The fox is back now but the food is gone. He’s elegant, his brush full and healthy, no sign of mange. He walks confidently but is wary, sniffs the ground, jumps back on the wall, back down to the garden to sniff again. Nothing left. 

I’ve moved back into this room, once my office until the children became too old to share and it became my daughter’s. She’s grown up hardy – it’s the coldest in the house. 

(The fox has run through my garden with a piece of chicken, off to a shed roof or the graveyard. A dog’s now in the garden sniffing.)

My desk, once a Victorian washstand is back in front of the window, but now only the wooden top survives, held up by four extendable legs. On it, my laptop and sewing machine. […]

The view through this window with its old, distorted glass, often becomes a tunnel. I live in the city and last night coming home late from a friend’s I met a badger on my path. Sometimes the past gathers like a migraine’s glittering distortions and stars around my eyes.

Jackie Wills, Fox summons the past

Crabgrass is lounging across the lawn and embedded in the garden beds, acting as if it had been there all along, which perhaps it was, abiding and biding its August time to stretch and lie languid, ducking its head under my mower, its roots defying my pull. Some tuberous rooted thing has lunged up in several places in the garden. What on earth is it? On earth indeed, in earth, and I can’t be bothered to unearth it, curious to see what it’s flowering into, sure I’ll regret it next year, as it takes over some corner of the yard. Witness the uninvited goldenrod, the drunken little asters propping each other up behind the deck, whatever that would-be bush that inserts itself everywhere. Some plants arrive dropped by bird poop, and I think about the seeds’ adventures: extruded from a root, nipped by a beak, floated through a digestive system, briefly flying through the air as part of a splat, and splat, dirt, rooted again. And again and again. A reminder of what can come of chance meetings, what glory can rise from a small hard thing.

Marilyn McCabe, Untitled

— It’s the delightful deliquescent dregs of August. The golden hour is doing the old razzle-dazzle like its life depended on it. […]

— Well, the idea that it is in writing that we can create ourselves. One of the ways. This is the thing about making, creating. It’s not even the thing that you end up making, but it’s how the making makes you. I’ve always loved that. And so of course we makers despair at the present time when it feels like that is being taken from us, from the futures of those would-be artists and writers, our youth. I spend a lot of time reacting in my mind to the sloppola. But on the ground level, I’m still doing my writing, I’m taking photographs. I’m making this and that.

— What we have is silence, the silence between words and passages of words, as Jenny Erpenbeck says here.

— We also have courage.

“hey, friends, courage,
life is beautiful”
— Adam Zagajewski, from his book Eternal Enemies

— When you have a day where you’re not certain if life is beautiful, I encourage you to take a mirror outside, into the garden, or the forest. Walk around with it and look. Prop it up here or there.

— When Rob is working on a painting he will often check it in a mirror so that he can see it afresh. I sometimes feel like I should be holding a mirror up to pretty much everything these days for a reality check, at least metaphorically. Which is also an old art forgery detection trick, as the reflected image often gives a sense if something is ‘off.’

Shawna Lemay, Courage, Silence, the Deliquescent Dregs

We saw smoke, and the terrible, twisted aftermath of flame. Most of all, we saw – and felt and heard – the dry bogs, the empty streams, the yellowed hills, the heavy air, the crunch of dessicated sphagnum for mile after mile after mile. The tiny velvety bodies of shrews on the hardened, waterless ground.

When I got home, the little bog I keep on my windowsill – a Kilner jar of moss and sundew – was all but dry. I’ve filled it repeatedly today: each time, the moss drinks with a deep thirst and needs more, more, more. I wish i could do the same for our bogs and fens and moors.

A few hours ago, Anna and I met to finalise tomorrow morning’s Writing Bogwise workshop, which will explore how creative writing can support positive ecological practice – and how nature connectedness can restore our health and humanity. When we read from some of the articles and poems we’ll be using – Jane Clarke, Gregory Norminton, Amanda Chester – I felt like some burnt and thirsty part of myself was drinking deeply too. 

Clare Shaw, Restoration: finding hope in a crisis

When the weather is good, I walk. Walking around my neighborhood is the only real exercise I get, so in Minnesota’s climate I’m lucky to be able to do it about half the year. I used to range more widely and see more of it; I also used to be a subscriber to the app NextDoor, a sometimes troubling mix of gripes, grudges, and rants about local issues. The juxtaposition led to the poem I want to share today. This year, my neighbors have proved that they’re better than that, going to great lengths to support the embattled immigrants among us. But in some places one still feels the discomfort, the sense of walling people out, that led to today’s poem, “An Enclosed Garden.”

Maryann Corbett, Walking the Neighborhood

It may be nothing more than the power of the mind and its ability to manifest (or the brain’s love affair with seeking out patterns), and if magic makes you uncomfortable, feel free to set it inside those safer contexts. But as I age and as the material world continues to disappoint, I’m tired of playing it cool. I’m more interested in leaning into spirit and feral female energy. There’s more for me in mushrooms and shells and mist on the lake than in patriarchy, capitalism and the horrors du jour they ask us to accept as par for the course.

I’ve always seen my energy as a force, but I’d characterized it previously by its intensity, chaos, hard edges, ambition, combustibility. This current energy has a different quality. It’s gooey. It breathes from its belly. It smells like salt and rosemary and bread in the oven. It smiles and floats and stirs and digs. It nests. […]

An earlier version of Carolee would’ve been (at least slightly) irritated with so many whirlwind trips to Maine. She would’ve seen them as distractions from the current plot line: finishing her manuscript. Instead, at every turn, including (and especially) the difficult trips, those visits back home opened paths for me to go deeper into the manuscript. Similarly, the naming of magic (and its practice) did not take away from work on the Gertie manuscript. It helped me see writing this book as casting a spell.

Carolee Bennett, Creative Life Lately: Maine, Magic, Manuscript

[…] we are
idle spit dried to salt
on steamy blacktop
withered illusions
screwed up tattoos

we are struggling steel in a hot metal world

This poem was accepted and published in Eunoia Review in 2018 after five other litmags rejected it. When I write something new I always note the date I began, this was begun on 5/17/18.

I was not a fan of Janis [Joplin]. She was a rock star of the 60s and I became a fan of rock music right about the time she died in 1970. Fast forward to 2018 when I discovered the poetry of Dorianne Laux and stumbled on her reading of her poem “Pearl” on PennSound Daily. Here is the direct link to Dorianne talking about and reading the poem. You can also read/hear it on The Slowdown here. Do listen! The power of that poem hit me like a ton of bricks. Even though I had never been a fan of Janis, the poem was so visceral and communicated Dorianne’s view of her so purposefully that it made me really see Janis and think of her in a way I never had before. That’s the power of poetry and of writing in general. A really good writer can make you see something in a whole new way, can actually shift your perspective. I love that. Since then, I’ve read articles about Janis and watched a couple of documentaries and now realize what a creative powerhouse she was and how she paved the way for women in rock music, a genre dominated by men.

Anyway, I don’t know what was going on with me on 5/17/18 when I wrote my poem but apparently I was feeling a kinship with “Pearl” in some way at the time.

Charlotte Hamrick, About & Including

I made it through torrential highway storms this week to introduce Arthur Sze at our CWC session on Transient Worlds, his fantastic new anthology exploring poetry in translation. It was a mesmerizing session, and deeply inspiring to hear how the project connects to his work as U.S. Poet Laureate—Sze has made the imaginative and connecting powers of translation his central focus.

In other news, my book’s title poem was published in The Rumpus this week (a huge thank you to Roxane Gay!). If you would like to purchase a signed copy of If You Love That Lady for yourself or someone else, please send me a message—I’ll cover the shipping.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

These poems were written a little while ago, and I never quite knew what to do with them. Well, it turns out that putting them together as a short, themed sequence (which anyway is how they were written) was just the right thing.

They all loosely speak to my enduring fascination with what I’ll inelegantly call (because I think it is called this) the theory of perception. I’ve talked before about how I think poems function as mini Rube Goldberg machines – well, take another step back and … does the same apply to us humans? We take in sensory input and, through a series of complex and ultimately quite bizarre processes, we come to understand the world around us. At the same time, we are converting inner thoughts and feelings into words and actions we express outwardly, in a way that leaves a mark on the world.

At this stage in proceedings, if you don’t know what a Rube Goldberg machine is, you might want to look here, or here, or even here.

So, we’re all Rube Goldberg machines, unwittingly but irreversibly wonkifying anything we come into contact with – converting an egg rolling off a shelf into a squeeze of toothpaste on a brush, or the action of a cuckoo clock into a buttered slice of toast. So, would you like to read eight poems ‘about’ that?

You would? Oh, great. The pamphlet is available to buy directly from Shadow & Sax’s online shop, along with other publications, including Urchin by Sand Letellier, which I’m looking forward to getting my hands on.

Victoria Spires, I suppose I do have something to sell

Every Sunday on his fantastic neonpajamas, Benjamin Niespodziany posts poems by others and then creates a prompt for the readers based on some element of that poem. The selection of poems is always great—tending toward the disjunctive and/or surreal and considering what language and all its strangeness can do. Readers are invited to post their responses to the prompts on the site or else elsewhere and then tag him. It’s a brilliant way to spend some time on a Sunday and I try to whenever I can. Last week, Ben posted a poem by Evan Nicholls whose work is always surprising and fresh. I wrote a response to the poem and the prompt (follow that link for both) though I only sort of followed Ben’s prompt because I was most interested in how Evan ended the poem. A really great twist at the end—funny but somehow revealing about one’s assumptions in the poem and in reading in general. There’s often a desire for a poem (or any text really) to speak to universal truths, it’s a satisfying, filling move. But Evan does an amazing turn in the last lines of his poem.

Gary Barwin, Neon Pajamas, Justice and the Pig

Be warned: if your usual method of reading, like mine, is to carry a book with you in your backpack everywhere you go, digging it out on train journeys and in sandwich queues, you will need to take extra care with #Moth (published by Ethel Zine and Micro Press). It’s a hand-stitched booklet, and as well as gold stitching it sports a delicate cover of silver paper, with thread used to add a textured filigree to the moth’s wing pattern and antennae. This is in keeping with the content of the book, which — at least initially — seems focused on the fragility of the human mind, in that it moves from a bus stop setting to a psyche ward in the first two pages, the transition implicitly triggered by the folding door of the bus, or some other simple act this motion approximates.

Holmes describes #Moth as a ‘hybrid text’, and it is — part poetry, part short fiction (it definitely advances toward an ending), utilising a mixture of clinical and lyrical language. There’s no contents page and it’s not always clear where poems begin and end, as there are a few different styles of heading and subheading. It also features a hybrid character at its centre — a woman who is part-moth, or perceived as part-moth by others:

brazen midriff, miniskirt:
body hair fine copper fuzz.

wings jostle inside his chest

Once it settles in there is a steady alternation between pieces which record fragments of doctor/patient conversation (verso) and miniature monologues by different moth species (recto), these preceded by images of the species in question on semi-transparent pages. It’s something of a power struggle; each monologue acts as a different guise worn by the main character — a response to the attempts of the doctor to categorise and contain her. 

Jon Stone, REVIEW: #Moth by Eleanor Holmes

Helen [Mort] is a poet I’ve been in conversation with poetically ever since I first started writing, although she didn’t know it at the time! I remember reading one of her Tall Lighthouse pamphlets a pint for the ghost, published in 2009 and being absolutely blown away – this was three years before my first pamphlet came out. In fact, I’ve just pulled the pamphlet out from my bookshelf and opened it up to find a poem on page 15 called ‘a dram for all the men I’ve never drank with’ – I can’t help but think that this subliminally must have influenced my second collection All the Men I Never Married, which I eventually published over ten years later.

Back to Helen’s fourth full-length collection Stepmother. I managed to get a copy of this from Helen when we read together at Haworth. For fans of Helen’s work, there is still her trademark playfulness and close attention to the musicality of language, but in many ways this feels like a bold departure from her previous work. It is a poetic investigation into the archetype of the stepmother – drawing on fairy tale, pornography and popular culture to examine how stepmothers play out in the modern family.

There are striking prose sections that sometimes read like lyric essays, sometimes like prose poems. There is something meditative about these pieces – there is ‘On silence’ and ‘On Origins’ and ‘On souls’. Silence is a theme that looms large throughout the book. This complicated relationship with speaking – when to speak up, when to be silent runs throughout the book. In “On Silence” a family photographer mistakenly calls the speaker of the poem ‘mum’ and the piece ends with ‘To speak would have seemed like a disavowal, a distancing. To stay silent meant taking something which was not yours.

‘So of course you said nothing. You took it’

The house as a domestic space is often a dangerous place, sometimes configured as a living being, a body that can swallow people whole – in the poem ‘In every house there is a cupboard’ finishes ‘When you lean into the cupboard, you could pitch yourself right down the house’s throat’.

It feels like a risky, risk-taking book. It made me think a little bit about A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk in its approach to examining the straitjackets that women are written into, or spoken into or moulded into by the forces that govern our lives and the forces that we let run loose inside us.

Kim Moore, July Reading Diary

When I was in Malaysia last year, I read with Beijing-based poet Anthony Tao. We discovered, amongst other things, a shared love of writing about bars: theatres of the absurd, meeting points, places of temporary epiphany.

I’ve been fascinated by pubs as spaces of storytelling since my pamphlet ‘a pint for the ghost’ back in the mid 2000s. When I got back to the UK after my fleeting trip to Penang, Anthony and I started writing a few poems-in-dialogue about bars.

I’m massively excited that Anthony is coming over to the UK at the end of this month and we’re going to be reading together along with Matt Byrne at Sheffield’s very own Over The Yardarm on 31st August.

Ahead of that gig, I thought I’d share a couple of drafts of things I wrote in response to poems by Anthony. Mine are set in Manchester, but the first piece took inspiration from a line in Anthony’s poem ‘Hanoi, Day and Night’.

If you want to see us in dialogue IRL, come to Sheffield on bank holiday Monday, August 31st!

Hope you like these two mini bar poems!

Irwell

‘..not stink, just fragrance gone too far.’ – Anthony Tao

The way Canal Street’s overcome
some nights by sudden river
so as you sit under the rainbow flags
at dusk, in unfit northern weather
you might smell something tar-like,
dankness, shipping’s aftermath,
the smoke-on-clothing reek
of defunct industry, lung-deep
and if you let yourself inhale
you’ll notice how the Irwell
holds the scent of everyone
it ever touched […]

Helen Mort, A poem walks into a bar

Poet, Iris Anne Lewis, has clearly chosen the title of her collection, Amber (Graffiti Books, 2024), with care. Amber, the highly valued, fossilised tree resin, is notable for its capacity to preserve traces of the ancient world, including insects and plants. Lewis’s collection performs a comparable act of preservation. It revisits the human past without sentimentality, often through artefacts and images that have survived across time and uses history as a lens through which contemporary life can be viewed with humanity, precision and perception.

Handprints, one of the strongest poems in the collection, is typical of the poems in the opening section, which focuses on history and prehistory. The first part of the poem, subtitled 30,000 BCE, describes the silhouetted handprints found in the caves of Gargas. Lewis vividly recreates the act of making them: ‘the artist splays hand to rock,/ sucks black pigment into hollow/ bone of swan, blows living breath/ into paint.’ The final phrase recalls the classical motif of gods breathing life into human beings. Here, however, it becomes both a metaphor for artistic mastery and an expression of the connection experienced by the modern viewer. These are not merely handprints; they stand for living people — ‘men/ women, children’ — who, although they lived many thousands of years ago, would have known ‘Disease…mourning…grief.’ In the second section of the poem, subtitled 2000 CE, that connection is extended into the present. Lewis moves us into neonatal units, where nurses help ‘bereaved mothers of still-birthed babies,/ take hand and footprints.’ The grief of early cave dwellers is echoed in a contemporary context: the experience of death, mourning and remembrance remains part of the human condition. Yet Lewis does not linger solely on loss. She then turns to the nursery school, where children make prints of their own hands and ‘Proud parents/ display’ this ‘infant art’ ‘on kitchen walls and fridges.’ This broadens the poem’s emotional range, presenting another enduring aspect of human experience: the impulse to create, to make marks and to assert presence. Lewis makes this universality explicit in the closing question: ‘which of us/ has not pressed hand/ to paper, drawn round our palm/ and fingers? Made this statement?// I am here. I matter.’ The poem therefore connects ancient handprints with the fundamental human need to express identity and affirm existence.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Amber’ by Iris Anne Lewis

Julia Webb’s fourth collection focuses on grief after bereavement. Grief can be a tricky topic as the poet can either include the reader, by focusing on exploration and communication or shut out the reader by focusing on the personal and individual response that the reader feels excluded from understanding the relationship or the person(s) behind the grief. Webb invites the reader in by focusing on the nature of unresolved relationships, the parts of connections and conversations of avoidance. There are dashes of colour (other than grey) and one poem turns a mother into an owl. Grief here is for a mother and a brother, without details given, not that the poet is obliged to give details, so readers can probe their own familial relationships through the lens offered. Grief is likened to “I have spent years falling out of each window” and its first line “the tall building of grief gave me”. 

Emma Lee, “Grey Time” Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press) – book review

Path, Chris Torrance, Aquifer, 2026, ISBN: 978-1-0684861-3-5

When I reviewed the Test Centre edition of Chris Torrance’s The Magic Door back in January 2018, I concluded by writing:

In his Afterword, Torrance refers to ‘at least 3 more books, taking The Magic Door into the 21st century’. I can only urge you to buy the current volume so that [Test Centre] might publish these outstanding volumes with the same diligence.

It has taken longer than I hoped, but thanks to Aquifer and editor Phil Maillard, we finally have not three, but nine new sections of Torrance’s major poem published together under the title Path, which is also the title of the first new section. The full list is:

Path
A Garden Book
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writing Tutor
RORI: A Book of the Boundaries
Frinite
Wobbly Chair
Dreamin’ Viv
Aurochs
A Book of Number/Gos Diaries

They vary in length from 9 to 40 pages, but each section, however short, is a self-contained book, albeit with recurring themes, including ones from the earlier volumes, running through. There’s so much going on in this book that I’ve decided to focus this review on just some of the many paths a reader could take to traverse it. There are, of course, other paths I could have taken, music, for instance, but to do full justice to this book, I’d need to write another one.

Billy Mills, Path by Chris Torrance: A Review

So, we have a looking-glass book in a Looking-Glass book, which ought to mean something — perhaps that the obvious parody of the quest tale in “Jabberwocky” can remind us that one way to read Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There is as a strange and dreamy quest. That’s suggested, too, by “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky,” the acrostic poem with which the narrative ends.

And suggested as well by the conversation with Humpty Dumpty:

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”

“Brillig means four o’clock in the afternoon,” Humpty Dumpty tells her, “the time when you begin broiling things for dinner.” And with his learnedly silly explications — “Who’s been repeating all that hard stuff to you?” he asks Alice — we’re warned off the side-quest. And back to the poem’s absurdity, parodic flavor, and bounce.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Jabberwocky

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

My mom bought me a copy of Langston Hughes’ The Dream Keeper–the edition illustrated by Brian Pinkney–shortly before my first day of school in 3rd grade. At one point I had most of those poems memorized. No longer. I was fascinated with the Beats in high school, mainly Burroughs, Welch, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Those last fellas are few tough heroes to have, I guess, but who doesn’t have those? College was the big sort of aha moment: Lorca, Mayer, Whitman, Dickinson, Baraka, Notley, O’Hara, etc. etc. I did my undergrad at Brooklyn College, so I was reading New Yorkers alongside New Yorkers. It became my world for a long time. I wrote poems with friends in them for friends and with those same friends–we had a big, rollicking, cinematic writing collective. In a lot of ways, I wrote poems so that I could have friends, too.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

This latest book took me about three and a half months to write. It’s the shortest bit of complete writing that I’ve ever (and probably will ever) accomplish. I was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers after my dad had fallen very ill. I’d basically alternate between rehab room / waiting room / car / Stewart’s (for those who don’t know, a regional convenience store franchise that sells ice cream, usually with bright orange booths for the newspaper-and-coffee set). The writing quite literally fell out of me. I just had to make sure I was able to catch all of it as it fell out. That type of writing feels blessed. It doesn’t happen too often. 

4 – Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?

I write every day, usually in the morning. In college I was introduced to the poetry of kari edwards, who I read fervently and obsessively, and who I think is one of our most massively underread late poets. I can’t remember the exact sequence and durations, but Rob Halpern notes, in his introduction to edwards’ succubus in my pocket, that she would wake, meditate for x hours, read philosophy for an hour, fiction for an hour, and poetry for an hour, constantly writing across these various texts, then finally eat breakfast, go back to reading, etc. I am not nearly as regimented or as robust in my mornings, but I drew a lot of inspiration from hir dedication to encounter and thought. Always reading. Always writing. 

For the most part, I am writing into a question or a feeling, or around a question or a feeling. I do a lot of circling and sizing up. Collage work, mosaic work, lots of tinkering in the first half of my process. I do a lot of work up front. Once the book is together, it’s mostly there. I will send it to a few friends to get a sense of sequencing and big picture work. 

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ryan Skrabalak

At the 2022 National Book Awards Finalist Reading, Sharon Olds prefaced her poem “Quarantine” like this: “I just thought that before I read my poem I would show that I rewrote it a little since it was in my book because I read it at a reading and there was something wrong with it. Something in the beginning especially and I fixed—I think I fixed it.” She explains that she removed four adjectives and one adverb from the first version and changed a noun. “So I’m very ha—I’m not afraid.”

A poem can be part of a critically acclaimed collection and also be not quite right, Olds is telling us, though the poem had seemed right to her at one time. And she can’t even be certain she’s completely addressed the problem. She starts to claim to have fixed it, then backtracks. She thinks she’s fixed it, she amends, which implies future changes may be required. And while she begins to say she’s happy with the newer version, she says instead that she’s not afraid. The audience claps and whistles.

I love what Olds offers us here. Isn’t that the task of every writer? To be not afraid? Not afraid to make work and not afraid to let strangers read it and judge it and not afraid to acknowledge the work’s failings and to try to fix those failings, even if the piece was previously declared finished. Even if it’s already been printed in a collection and that collection is up for the National Book Award, for instance.

Which brings me back to the idea that I was issuing corrections while putting together my book. In an interview with Brian Brodeur, Keetje Kuipers was asked how she knows a poem is ready to be published. “I don’t mind the idea that drafts of my poems (good drafts, ones that have had careful attention and revision, but drafts all the same) are appearing in journals and magazines,” she says. “In some ways, it gives me a lot of pleasure to think that I’m sharing that process with a wider audience, and that people may have the opportunity to encounter a single poem in widely varying incarnations by the time it appears in a book.”

I love this as well—this practice of sharing drafts with readers. In rewriting an already-public poem, you admit which parts of your work you found wanting or that you maybe just outgrew. It’s vulnerable and brave to hold your poems with such open hands, allowing observers into your process and accepting that your current creative choices might feel wrong in the future. How comforting to know that even Sharon Olds needs to make corrections. How freeing to think of them as Keetje Kuipers does—not as corrections but as incarnations. Each version of a poem granted its own place in the world. The first version with the plums in it and the second one with pears because plums are trite, aren’t they, and the third iteration with the red plums back in because they are delicious and nearly my favorite fruit, even if William Carlos Williams liked them too, and so it should be plums, I’ve decided. For now.

The Generous Act of Publishing Drafts: Poems as Iterations – guest post by Abbie Kiefer (Trish Hopkinson)

As we close in on the last couple weeks of the open reading period, I am enjoying wading into the submissions pool and have even started accepting some titles for the first couple months of the 2026-27 season (and amazingly am somewhat on schedule getting these last handful of books out for this past season, which is wrapping up as we speak.) I am once again thinking about what makes a manuscript a definite “yes” and what makes me take a pass on the “no”s. Some manuscripts stand out for their strangeness, their innovation. This can be subject matter-wise, language-wise, stylistic, or narrative. It can mean using page space in interesting ways. Using art and graphics mixed in. Using found texts and appropriated forms like glossaries and diagrams. I like books that go for bold in some ways. That aren’t afraid to take risks. I’ve often heard from authors that the book I accepted had been out in submission for a minute and no one was biting. I sometimes am just that weirdo that loves it or sees the potential in it. 

We have recent books that are erasures and black outs. Books that masquerades as other kinds of text–prose, charts, indices. We have books that include original art by the author (which now that we are using a professional  printer, look even more amazing than when I was doing them in house.) This is also true of books that use the page space in interesting ways, which we can now do in differing sizes than the standard paperback dimensions. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part 2

Independent publishing has always operated on the slimmest of margins. It’s not the oil business. In that business, there’s a vertical marketplace. Shell digs the oil, refines it, carries it on the big boat, and sells it to you at the pump. That’s a lucrative business to start with.

The writer gets a piece of the action.

The distributor gets nearly a third.

The printer gets 10-15%.

The bookstore gets about half.

In the end, the publisher doesn’t have enough to buy tuna.

It’s a business that is run on prayer. If you have wealthy friends, and grants, and a few authors who sell well, and you don’t waste any money, and nothing bad ever happens to you, and you don’t make any mistakes, you might survive. That’s a lot to ask in one life, especially for a nonprofit leader.

I like the phrase “Money should flow toward the writer.” Why stop at money? Why not tequila?

The problem is that in the oil business, there is already money. In the publishing business, unless you are in New York, there isn’t any money flowing.

I talked with an agent the other day who said, “Why did you get into this business?”

I told her the truth: “I was in love with stories that wanted homes. I loved Duras and Colette and Marquez and Calvino and Morrison, and I wanted to climb across the fields, run through the forest, and find what was hanging out there longing for the right editor. What about you?”

She said, “I like money.”

I wanted to write back and suggest she move over to JPMorgan, where she could think about money all the time. Investment banking and tech are the fields where you get to like money. Not publishing.

Kate Gale, Keepers of the Flame: Stepping Up in the Dark

I’ll be interviewing Emily Wilson for Literary Hub next month, so more on this soon. In the meantime, some notes from my reading of her fabulous new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature. The book, which will be out September 1st, ranges widely, building toward a dazzling final essay in which she lays out her particular philosophy of translation.

Called “Translating the Odyssey,” the essay had its start in a series of tweets in which she compared and contrasted translations for the first line of the poem, specifically the first adjective Homer attaches to his hero.

Polytropos

Robert Fagles gave us “the man of twists and turns.” And Daniel Mendelsohn translated it as the man “who had so many roundabout ways / To wander.” While Emily Wilson made headlines when she wonderfully used, “A complicated man.”

One critic joked that it sounded more like his relationship status on Facebook but I love the translation!

One word, and already the translators diverge—each hearing something different in the Greek, each also responding to the versions that came before.

My own favorite is the one by Stanley Lombardo. A classics professor and Zen teacher, he rendered the first lines like this:

Speak, Memory—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again

As Wilson points out in her essay, Lombardo’s “Speak, Memory” is a Nabokovian wink. His version also takes polytropos apart, distributing its possibilities across “cunning,” “wanderer” and “blown off course.”

Reading them together, Wilson shows us not only how much each translator relies upon the Greek, but how much they also relied on the English versions that came before them. Translation, she reminds us, is not a solitary encounter between a translator and an original.

It is also a conversation, and sometimes an argument, across generations.

Leanne Ogasawara, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea & the Politeness of the Genji Translators

For those of you who don’t know what the GCSE poetry exam looks like, it varies a little between exam boards but essentially, we teach them fifteen poems from the anthology we’ve been using since 2015. One of the poems will be printed on the exam paper and then students have to write an essay comparing it to one of the other fourteen, none of which are printed on the exam paper. They’re comparing something they can see with something they are trying to remember. They are expected to include analysis of language features, poetic structure and the historical context of both poems. Then they do almost the same thing all over again, but with two poems they’ve never seen before, though both of these are printed on the paper this time. These are Sections B and C of a three-section exam (one of two exams) which lasts 2 hours and 15 minutes for most students. If they have a condition which qualifies them for extra time, they’re doing this for the length of The Odyssey movie. Many cope admirably with these demands. Many do not. And whether they cope has almost nothing to do with how many annotations they made, and it definitely doesn’t have much to do with how much they like poetry. Lots of young people love poetry, and say wonderful things about it, and write wonderful poetry themselves. The exam doesn’t necessarily encourage that out of them, that’s all, so what is it testing? If I’m honest, I wish we could assess poetry entirely on unseen responses; take away the stress of the anthology and see what they can really do with a poem.

Even though they can’t take notes into the exam any more (phew), a lot of my students in recent years have become a bit obsessed with them. Annotations are trending, it appears. There are pastel highlighters and insta-style calligraphied headings and colour coded post-its. […]

I think the thing about annotations at this level is that they’re a poor proxy for learning – students feel much happier when they have them and they enjoy making them look beautiful, but ultimately that isn’t the same thing as understanding or genuine insight. This isn’t the kids’ fault. They want to pass, and many have been disempowered by social media, and their self-esteem is often so low that they don’t trust their own ideas. I’ve had intuitive, creative, diligent students, loads of them, sit and wait with poised pens for me to tell them what to write down. It makes me uneasy, that. It’s not the kind of teaching I’m up for. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 23: Hopkins again, and Darren.

At first I thought I would put one object per table, and then I thought it would be more interesting to have several objects.  Some tables had connected objects:  for example, on one table I put Christmas ornaments, a Christmas card, a packet of replacement bulbs for a strand of holiday lights.  On another, I kept the objects from the natural world:  3 feathers, a pine cone, and some shells.  Other tables were more random collections.

I was also pleased with how many tactile experiences they could have.  I had two felted pieces, along with chunks of wood and chunks of asphalt.  The cross made out of palm stalks and the waxy, half-burnt candle gave different sensations.  I put out broken strings of beads and broken pottery.

I told students that they would need paper and something to write with, or they could take laptops to write on.  They all chose paper, and I told them to make sure they had enough paper.

Students sat at a table and had 30 seconds to look at the objects.  Then they wrote for 3 minutes.  They could write about the object or write in the voice of the characters we created in past class sessions or explore their own memories.  I wasn’t looking at their writing, so they had plenty of latitude, as long as they kept writing.

After three minutes, they moved to the next table, a process which went smoothly.  At the end, I had them read all the writing they had done, marking any that had potential.  I reminded them that they could go deeper, but I wasn’t requiring it.  For me, it’s too much policing, having students write for 20-30 minutes.

My students seemed to really like the process.  They talked about how many ideas it generated and how much fun it was to write about random objects.  They also talked about their wonder at what all was waiting to be written about–and I reminded them that we live in a world of random objects, so whenever they feel blocked, they should remember this technique.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Random Objects in the Creative Writing Classroom

I received a lovely message the other day from someone wanting to run a poetry event with their members and looking for some input from a poet, including delivering a talk and a short reading for inspiration alongside some optional involvement further down the line.

I was thrilled, still am really, I don’t often get messages like this.

So I wrote back saying yes I’m interested and asking for some more information, a timeline, and what kind of compensation they’re offering. I received in response:

“I had not anticipated paying for this as I was hoping poets and authors would like to volunteer their time to the next generation of writers.”

Yep. Goodwill and inspiration and yes I probably should have expected that despite them being a national organisation. And that’s ok, I’m not angry so I hope this post doesn’t come across that way, but it raised a familiar (and tired) story.

Why is it so acceptable to ask creatives to work with no offer of payment? In business, ‘time is money’, ‘people’s time is money’, but that doesn’t seem to apply so readily to us. As if we magically don’t need to earn an income from our work.

And yes it’s lovely to inspire the next generation, but you’re contacting me from a multi-institutional organisation that clearly has money (and probably funding), while I’m a singular human living off less than 20k a year. It’s super easy for you to suggest moral reward is enough … would you mind suggesting that to my landlord too?

I feel like there’s this weird dual stereotyping of writers that goes on:

No 1. is that you’re a ‘starving artist’ living hand to mouth and writing furiously till the wee hours every night but somehow at peace with this because you’re ‘creatively fulfilled’ and have ‘chosen’ this life.

No 2. is that because you’re ‘a writer/an author’ with a public profile saying as much you’ve clearly reached the heights of career and financial stability and can volunteer your time any which way.

Realistically the first is bloody hard and frustrating for all of us, and the second, well, maybe if you’ve gone into writing crime fiction or romance and are churning out a book every year…

Either way neither of them seem to amount to many offers of payment for work undertaken. And both of them mean that a huge amount of our time is taken up by either trying to write as much as possible and send as much out on submission as possible alongside actual employment, or trying to write as much as possible and apply for as many grants/residencies/projects as possible to keep the money coming in. Neither of which is great ground for volunteering a bunch of time. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t volunteer, I do think it’s important to volunteer for things when we can.

But when you reduce it down what’s happening is an organisation is asking for a service, one which you can provide and they can’t because you’ve trained and worked hard over a number of years to develop the skills to be able to do it. And then you’re asked to do it for free, regularly. It’s a systemic devaluing of those skills.

Rachael Hill, I was hoping you’d volunteer your time…

Let me preface this with a confession: I’m not great about managing my time. Period. I can get distracted doing laundry—maybe I get a call and walk upstairs to talk—and then I might start emptying the dishwasher, leave that half done because I suddenly remember an email I need to respond to, then get sidetracked responding to emails (or scrolling), then remember I have to pay some bills while I’m online, then wander back into the kitchen for some coffee, only find the dishwater open and half unloaded. Maybe, just maybe, I remember that I was in the middle of doing laundry earlier, and I head back to the basement to finish that.

Whew. If that sounds familiar, I’m sorry, and hello, you’re my people.

That said, someone asked during a Q&A in San Miguel about balancing different parts of the work—writing, of course, but also and other kinds of work, and caregiving, and admin, and social media (if you choose to use it), etc. Despite being a little scatterbrained in my daily life, I had an answer: You get your own best time.

Let me explain. I know that my brain is freshest and most primed to write—to be imaginative, to generate fresh ideas, to find new solutions to old problems—first thing in the morning, before the day has a chance to get at me. Before my phone starts ringing and the emails start piling up, and I get pulled in multiple directions. That’s just me. Maybe your best, freshest time is late at night, when everyone is in bed and the house is finally quiet. Or midday, when you’ve cleared a few things from your plate and can focus on creative work.

But whenever you are sharpest, give yourself and your creative work that time. Don’t devote the best thinking part of your day to emails and errands.

If you’re best in the morning, like me, try to set aside some morning time to write. Maybe that means getting up before your family (I put a quiet Keurig in my bedroom for a reason). I try to devote mornings to anything generative, and save my afternoons, when I feel a little duller, for errands and admin work like emails. I don’t need peak creativity to go to the UPS store or the pharmacy. I don’t need to bring my best sentence-building potential to my inbox.

Maggie Smith, Pep Talk

Here are a few helpful questions I ask myself when I begin a critique:

1. What work is the title doing? Is it a placeholder? Is it forgettable?
2. Are there any moments in the poem where I am confused?
3. What images / lines stay with me when I am done reading the poem?
4. Does the opening line intrigue me and make me want to read more?
5. Is there anywhere in the poem where I begin to lose interest?
6. Could this poem be lineated differently? Are the line breaks doing any work to add meaning or are they distracting?
7. Is this poem in the correct order? Could an idea or stanza be moved elsewhere in the poem to achieve a different effect?
8. What do you notice with the sound – repetition, assonance, consonance, rhyme or slant rhyme?
9. What is this poem leaving out? Could the poet explore an idea further?
10. What is not essential in the poem?

Though they do take time and can be daunting to begin, if you have the opportunity to be involved with critique, you should do it.

It is one of the best ways to grow as a writer, sharpening your “editing eye” – evaluating why a piece is working or why it isn’t, seeing what is missing, what is unnecessary, thinking through how a piece of writing effects the reader.

Renee Emerson, How to Critique a Poem

How much of writing and submitting are just…waiting? Far too much. I write a lot, way more than I publish, and I submit I would say a fair amount (like between a couple and a dozen submissions per month, I’d say). I’m right now trying to find a place that will publish my next book as well as individual poems. But how powerless are writers like me? Unless you’re one of the chosen (ie, you’re friends with the editor of Paris Review, or got an NEA grant when they still existed, or a supergenius grant, etc,) you’re playing a waiting game. Sending out your work, then waiting sometimes over a year for a rejection.

Sometimes the name of the game is empowering yourself by staying proactive in sending out your work or distracting yourself with other hobbies or work. Distraction isn’t a bad idea if you’re worrying about your work and writing something else—an essay or short fiction if you’re a poet or sketching a local scene or taking photos—something else creative—is a good way to help. And sometimes talking to other writers and encouraging them (or listening to their worries) is helpful too.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Practically Perfect Summer Day with Goldfinches and Dahlias, Sleepwrecked, and Writing as a Waiting Game

Is it worth all the effort? All the research and rejections that come along with it? A while ago I wrote about the dangers and blessings of the publishing “dance” in an essay that Trish Hopkinson published on her blog. You can read it here: Why You Should Submit Even if You’re Not 100% Sure You’re Done

I still stand by what I said in the article. In hindsight, I do have new and additional thoughts. When I was younger, I thought the point of getting published was to make a name for myself as a poet and build a career. That wasn’t wrong exactly, but over the years I’ve found other reasons that are more meaningful. What has proven to be a lot more real and fun about getting published, is finding my tribe. […]

What do I mean by that? Every time I get something published, I read the work of the poets who were published alongside me. I make note of the poems I particularly enjoy. I earmark those as poems to use in my workshops. Then I social-media stalk them – add them as friends, tell them how much I like their work, invite them to be on The Poetry Saloncast, ask if they’re doing readings in my area.

Over the years these shared poems have led to some seriously meaningful friendships, collaborations, and ongoing artistic support systems. One of the friends I met through mutual publication hosted me at a poetry reading in Colorado when I came out on book tour. Another invited me to the beach in North Carolina to do a reading for her venue. Some have been on retreat with me in Costa Rica. Many have invited me to speak to their classes, submit to their journals, or just stay in touch.

Tresha Faye Haefner, Find Your Poetry Tribe This Saturday at The Poetry Salon

7. The Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe

Since Swan, the character in my poem, had his own website, his own social media accounts and was beginning to develop his own identity it felt only right that he’d be on a dating site.

I set up a profile under My Name Is Swan and waited. I got one enquiry, a message that read, “Who are you? What are you?” “I’m a poem,” Swan replied. “Interesting,” came the response, “where can I read you?” “Come to the Swan pub by Shakespeare’s Globe and you can hear me instead,” wrote Swan providing a day and a time.

Swan arrived early and found his ‘date’ already at a table. He sat down opposite and delivered his poem in its entirety. His date listened intently and then when it was done she stood up. “Thank you Mr Swan,” she said. And then she left. And Swan never heard from her again.

Strange rating: 6/10
Danger rating: 1/10
Beauty rating: 7/10

*

6. The Swan and ******

I’m not gonna reveal the full name of this pub, not because I fear any repercussions but because I may give the impression that it’s a bit of a rough house. It’s not. The landlord was great, the staff were lovely and the punters, well, they were a bit lively. Lads in hard hats straight off the building site, hitting the Stella Artois. This was undoubtedly a proper boozer I’d walked into. No frills, no messing, a working man’s taproom and, if I’m honest, quite an intimidating place to read poetry.

The boys were a few pints in and the pool game was getting pretty animated. I picked my moment and, unannounced, launched into My Name Is Swan. You can see how anxious I was – this moment is recorded in the closing seconds of our film of the same name. I just went for it. The lads gathered round, came in close, clutching their pool cues. I kept reading, half expecting to get a pool cue wrapped around me canister at any second. It didn’t happen. When I was done I got one of the most enthusiastic rounds of applause I’ve ever received. It taught me something about peoples’ ability to appreciate poetry, this innate capacity we have for art and also how judgemental we can be about who it’s supposed to be for.

I understand they serve Thai food in this pub now. I may, sadly, be responsible for its gentrification. I do hope not. And so does Swan.

Strange rating: 4/10
Danger rating: 6/10
Beauty rating: 6/10

Jan Noble, Nº78 The top ten strangest, most dangerous and most beautiful places that I’ve read poetry

Highlights of the Telluride Mushroom Festival? What I’ll remember longest, I suspect, is a guided foray at Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan Mountains. The “guided” part came and went. The leader walked too quickly for me, both because I wanted to look around and because, at 10,000 feet, I’m easily winded. I wasn’t the only one in our large group taking it slow, though. There was so much to look at! Coral mushrooms, violet cortinarius, warty yellow amanitas, a billion LBMs (little brown mushrooms, often stymieing even the experts), tall plants I’d never seen before (bear grass, I was told), slightly worrisome elk and bear scat (enormous amounts!). My fellow ramblers were interesting people, sometimes knowledgeable foragers in their own right. Plus we all reconnected at the end, where the guide confirmed that Chris had found king boletes–porcini, essentially. Back at our rental I fried them in olive oil with salt and pepper until the pieces were golden and slightly crisped. They were GLORIOUS.

Also terrific: how much poetry was part of the gathering! The poetry events were organized by poet Art Goodtimes, a festival co-founder, who has a lot more energy than seems possible in a eighty-year-old. An “open myc” at the library had a lovely, inclusive, community vibe, alternating poetry and music. The big evening poetry show at the Sheridan Opera House was a wilder yet tightly choreographed mix that also featured hilariously shroomy raps, parodies, and more–Art presiding, this time, in a red sequined tailcoat. What a trip (although I was sober) to see SO many enthusiastic people desperate to snag seats in the audience! On the last day, Art and I signed a collaborative chapbook, Hyphae, designed for the occasion, which I’ll say more about below.

Lesley Wheeler, Hyphae–and gifts

After the rain, heat and humidity
push up brown clumps of mushrooms

across the yard. Everything in the underground
links hands—from one season to another, unwilling

to let go. In my kitchen I pick up a dragonfruit from a bowl,
the same kind you bought in the market and brought

to my hotel room years ago […]

Luisa A. Igloria, Approaching the Third Anniversary of Your Death

Today, waking to the excitement of no plans, I packed my rucksack, cycled to my allotment via coffee and cake at C’s, unlocked my shed, assembled my hammock stand and slung my hammock.

A few weeks ago, when my sweetcorn crop was at its peak, inbetween hammock-reading and dozing, I used my camping stove to flash-boil cobs, then anointed them with butter, before eating them like an unholy rodent.

Today, in tune with the ripening season, I dug some desirée potatoes then, satisfied with my haul for now, lay in my hammock to read ‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, and drink elderflower cordial. Of course, I dozed. I read more. 

Deakin’s accounts of swimming fit well with the sway and lull of hammocking, with the being held in the same view as when backstroking. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sling My Hammock

I often experience my body as “other.” Culture sets us up for this view, Descartes and all that, but it also makes intuitive sense that we would feel quite separate from our bodies. In meditation, it is the idea of ultimately being an “observer” of my life that is most confusing. How can one experience feelings, and observe them at the same time? As a longtime dissociator, I beg to differ. So here is a poem along these lines; bear with me through the extended metaphor.

Life at Sea

1–

I am born inside a ship.

2–

I am inside my body.
My body is a ship on the sea.

3–

My body is a ship on the sea
sailing unawares
its muscles, rafters, joints
creaking, bending
straight into the storm. […]

Rebecca Cook, Life at Sea

My tomatoes have been going wild this year, with plants 7 feet tall, 8 feet in circumference, all of them loaded with fruit. I should not mind sharing with a few very hungry caterpillars when, after all, I’m loading my friends with tomatoes and making more sauce than Best Beloved and I can possibly consume in a year. And yet, it is rather annoying. So I was scouting the internet when I found this blog from Brie Arthur re hornworms. It’s a nice overview and shows “both sides” of hornworm invaders (though as she is in North Carolina, she has tobacco hornworms on her tomatoes).

Hornworms bring to my mind two very astonishing Stanley Kunitz poems written from the worm’s viewpoint. A tricky task, taking the persona of a non-human and still avoiding the more common issues of anthropomorphism. Kunitz, a master, pulls it off. Here is an excerpt from “Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation.”

All day, all night, I carry on my back
embedded in my flesh, two rows
of little white cocoons,
so neatly stacked
they look like eggs in a crate.
And I am eaten half away.

If I can gather strength enough
I’ll try to burrow under a stone
and spin myself a purse
in which to sleep away the cold;
though when the sun kisses the earth
again, I know I won’t be there.
Instead, out of my chrysalis
will break, like robbers from a tomb,
a swarm of parasitic flies,
leaving my wasted husk behind.

I encourage you to read the entire short poem. So layered. And it gave me new respect for the animals that eat the same things we want to eat, who can blame them?

Ann E. Michael, Hornworms

A day
like today
the air
feels invisible.
Crickets sing
steady songs
while catbirds
riff solos.
Who wants
to think
of darkness?
But look:
the plant
that means
the year
will turn
is blooming.

Rachel Barenblat, Cusp

i mean, death looks more alive than the scholar, right? he is animated, urgent, dynamically beseeching. as if he knows what the doctor has failed to grasp: that mortal life is short, that the ephemeral and embodied joy of music is as real and valuable as the abstract, theoretical weight of learning. so even as the skeleton-maestro leads the doctor on to death, he summons him (and us) to life.

or, read the image another way, and it becomes about resolve: standing fast and holding faith in the face of death’s destructive antics and strange glamour. i’ve needed to keep both these thoughts in mind at different times in my life and what i’ll laughingly call my “career”, which is why i’m sharing this with you now, and why…

i have selected this as the cover image for the department of queer complaint, a collection of poems (finally) forthcoming from the mighty poetry bus press. the collection has been knocking around since my tenure at cambridge ended, but for all sorts of reasons, it now feels like time to shove it up poetry’s peep hole and have done with it. watch this space. or not. it’s going to be wild.

Fran Lock, IT’S TIME

霧吸うてだんだん秋の人  高山れおな

kiri sūte dandan aki no hito  

            inhaling fog
           slowly I become
            an autumnal human

                                                Leona Takayama

from Hyakudai Keiko (100 Waka Theme Practice), a haiku collection of Leona Takayama, Gendai Tanka Sha, Kyoto, 2025

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (August 20, 2026)

This week: a bowl of heat, the musicality of machines, an Emily Dickinson pilgrimage, the slow rebuilding of the world, and much more. Enjoy.

Last month I was in Grantown-on-Spey with a group of friends for our annual hillwalking week. The house we’d hired gave splendid views down over Abernethy forest to the Cairngorm hills. On the Monday, we climbed Bynack More, via the route that passed the green lochan, Lochan Uaine and Ryvoan bothy. On the Wednesday we went cycling. I stopped in a farm track to look across the river toward the hill we’d climbed. A plume of smoke was rising from the forest in the foreground. At that moment, the farmer arrived in his truck. He glanced at the scene through binoculars, and said “I presume someone has called that in?” Someone had. Very soon we heard sirens and fire-trucks.

Some of my friends are musical; they always bring guitars and a fiddle on our holiday. That evening, they were playing the corny old favourite, Will ye go, lassie, go? But over the musicians’ heads I could see the ever-growing plumes of smoke and, as night fell, lines of flames rampaging across the hillside, the very place we’d walked.

How do we make a poetry of witness? Is that the best we can do? Is lyric, and linguistic cohesion appropriate, as we move into disintegrated times? Can poetry offer any resistance or redress? A piece written quickly has flaws: does that matter? All the questions. I felt duty bound to do something.

I wrote this quickly, and was struggling with the ending. Lines came in and lines went out. There was the idea of what we inherit and bequeath. Or squander and fail to pass on. It seemed that what was burning was our culture, as well as the forest. The securities my generation had known are all destabilised.

The song itself came to my rescue, giving me the last few lines. The Observer was good enough to publish it immediately. But already Dunwich Heath was on fire too, and god knows how much of Europe.

Kathleen Jamie, We’ll all go together

The pain in my joints
telegraphs in morse. I read Ghalib
instead. The monsoon sings in
staccato. There is not enough rain
this year to quench hearts.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stubborn living

In Somerset (and everywhere), August grass is the colour of the paper we used to stain with tea at school to make fake parchment. I would repeat the tea trick at home in my room, made my handwriting cursive. I always wanted to be older than I was.

The rest of the country is on fire. Europe is on fire. Perhaps the moors around Sheffield will be burning when we get back to them. We sit in the bowl of heat at the cricket ground and watch Rocky Flintoff score his first century. My son accepts suncream and a hat. My dad says he’s never worn a hat in his life and he isn’t about to start now. […]

The stands erupt in a cheer. Lancashire are winning. The world is sizzling. We are having a lovely time!

Strangers talk to you here, under the sun, share fans and sunglasses. Two men from East London are impressed by Alfie’s seven year old understanding of ratios. When the cricketers take their helmets off, I’m amazed by how young they look, how expectant, even watched from a distance. They hope the field has been perfected for them. That it’s all to play for.

My dad’s friend takes his arm without him having to ask. Together, they start to walk, slowly and with great care. A street in Taunton. The earth. The universe. Amen.

Helen Mort, Postcards of fire

Isn’t this what you prayed for? To burn
with visions, to suffer like God.
Specter, voice from the living grave,
are you more pure there
than the maid on the footpath, begging
penance, shut within
the anchorage
of an earthly body?

Renee Emerson, To Julian of Norwich

Your large shadow turns the seabed into a twilight zone,
you have stolen the sun’s light, wearing it like a halo. […]

I am writing poems in response to a close reading of Valmiki’s Sundara Kāṇḍa of the Ramayana. I allow each sarga to become the seed for a meditative poem, entering its unwritten interior—the spaces between what is narrated and what the text leaves open to the imagination.

Uma Gowrishhankar, Displacing Earth and Sky

I’m planning a new project, hopefully one with money attached. I’m starting a Patreon for this new project, which is tentatively titled “Eating Popeye’s In Romania,” and the early plan is to write and maybe make videos about our experiences in Romania for the coming year. I’m using Popeye’s as one of the lenses for this project because it’s been a running joke for me ever since I left Louisiana in 1999 that the first thing I look for in a new place is to see if there’s a Popeye’s. Sometimes I think the hardest part of the 4 years I did at Arkansas for my MFA wasn’t the workshops, it was the lack of spicy fried chicken and dirty rice that I didn’t make myself.

Brian Spears, A New Project in the Works

This holiday was meant to be nine days of uninterrupted, unscheduled time – plenty to write several poems that would form part of the central sequence, and to think about structure and order and a title and all those other important things.

Did I write any of those poems? Reader, I did not. It’s hard to know what I did do with all that time. I read a lot (four novels and some poetry). I went to check on the chickens (there was a hen coop at the bottom of the garden, also featuring two peacocks and some guinea fowl). I tried and sometimes succeeded to empty my mind of the myriad daily anxieties that keep it entertained. I looked minutely at plants and insects and took arty photos and conducted slow, aimless perambulations. I had some very lazy breakfasts (is there anything finer?).

I did write, almost every day. It did not come easily, despite the absolute abundance of easy inspiration all around. Slowly, and with much pulling of teeth, I wrote strange little poems about things like the wind, and pomegranates. All are in couplets, and follow the same format in terms of title, rough line length and style. The same deal with writing them as with everything these days: I had to be not thinking about them, to think about them properly. They would come in snippets, sometimes a line or just a couple of words at a time and I would have to periodically haul myself out of the pool to write them down. I described them to someone in a message as a form of poetic displacement activity. Sounds cute, not sure what it means. I’ve got eight poems (at the current count) out of it.

I’m also not sure what I’ll do with them. Maybe nothing. Maybe you’ll see them in a journal in a few months’ time. There are a couple I quite like. I’ve got out of the habit of writing for the sake of writing, i.e. without any particular goal already in mind, and maybe that was the point of it afterall.

Victoria Spires, Poigravanje pjesmama

Dust pan. Water jog jug. Shoes. Scraps of paper everywhere. Into the mouth of Rahu. Into the garden of arrested type. Here, the people claim little interest in “the spectacle of language in a mode of exhaustion.” They claim little patience for “I’m coming to slit your throat.” It turns our all of our plans are masks. We found it out by telling it to a bug and watching it as it learned to see through us. After all, this is what is meant by “the city of common interests” and “the city of hand in hand.” Everyone is eating their way through a dream, and in the end, there is no choice. You pay the price, and you tell them you belong.

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 3)

slow afternoon
the curve
of green bananas

Vaishnavi Ramaswami
Chennai, India

One thing the heat seems to do is make me very lethargic. I was reading the June issue of The Heron’s Nest last night, and as I always do, copying out some of my favourite haiku (I choose my absolute favourites from all four issues of 2026 and, in January 2027, send them in for the reader’s choice awards).

The above haiku seemed to sum up the slow pace of recent hot days and I love the specifity of ‘green bananas’. Strangely though, the poem also chimed with viewing the solar eclipse, which we did yesterday evening, through some welding glass borrowed from my Dad! Equally entertaining was the variety of camera obscuras made from shoe boxes and cereal packets that people brought onto the field behind our house. I’ve included a photo below, which was taken on my phone with the help of a very kind stranger, juggling the phone and the glass to get a focus. Nothing like as good as what our friends filmed in Madrid yesterday and sent via WhatsApp, but I was entranced by the odd green tinge – like the underipe bananas!

Julie Mellor, heatwave summer

My dad was a strange and wonderful person. He could be very giving, sometimes he could be quite controlling, he was quite shy and he was also the life and soul of the party. He liked exploring and travel and doing things his own way, no matter what. He is missed.

The poem I’m about to share with you is about the strange limbo land that is an Intensive Care Unit, and how the strangeness of the ward enhanced the strangeness of death.

I want to talk to you about writing poetry about death, or grief. This is the sort of poetry I am probably best known for. […]

My dad died in the intensive care unit in Castle Hill, four years ago today. I had never been in an intensive care unit before my dad went into one, and it was not at all like I expected it to be. I have strange, detached memories of the time; they are very sensory memories – the musicality of the machines around us; much more than on a normal ward, the machines were constantly, quietly beeping, slightly different notes in different rhythms so that occasionally they would fall together and beep all at the same time and then move apart, like some sort of celestial star pattern, something unnoticeable until it aligned.

I remember the structure of the ward – a central desk and all the bays like the rays of a child’s drawing of a sun.

Wendy Pratt, Doubts I had while writing poems about my dad’s death

The last thing he ate was a plate
of scrambled eggs. When we took him
to the hospital, the traffic lights kept
changing to yellow—the color of caution,
the color of waiting between stop and go.
I think about him at the store, my hands
hovering over bouquets with sunflowers.

Luisa A. Igloria, What the Body Wore Before it Left this World

I’m back to squeezing my writing into the weekends; scribbling, shaping, editing between the dibs and drabs of laundry, cleaning and doing coursework while the kids are away. I have very few breaks in my new role, so I doubt I’ll get much journaling done at school, so this time feels precious and reserved as much as possible for writing and chilling. 

I do it more as journaling rather than necessarily working towards writing a poem. The notes I write are more an extension to my journals than focussed on working towards a poem for publication or a collection: what I’ve been thinking about over the past few days, what I’ve experienced. This weekend’s writing has had chunks of lines about the eclipse and they are now maybe sliding into a rough poem. 

Strangely enough, the poem is pretty disconnected from what actually happened. My poems are usually autobiographical these days, but this one, while based in reality, wasn’t what I was thinking about when I was out in the street, waiting for the clouds to clear. It was exaggerated or enhanced like the retelling of a good anecdote: a nugget of reality wrapped in silver foil. 

That’s one of the writing exercises I used to give my students: take a true event, but write it like a tall tale or myth. They could use it for fiction, poetry or even autobiography. We all have those stories we tell at dinner with friends, when everyone needs to one-up on the craziness of their lives to keep the fun going. We take an event that really happened and make it more dramatic, more miserable or joyous, more crazy, just MORE. 

Exaggerate, make it impossible, but compelling, lie, shape it to explain something about you, your life or the world. That basis in truth makes the fiction so much more believable and enjoyable. So I didn’t have these big thoughts, the person I’m speaking to wasn’t there, wasn’t on my mind, is possibly not even real. But the eclipse happened, the details and setting hold it together and sell it. 

Gerry Stewart, A Nugget of Reality Wrapped in Silver Foil.

We unpacked the knitwear and then headed straight over to The Bridge Inn, where the poem began, to ask about visiting their toilets. We had a wonderfully warm and friendly greeting when we entered, and this made it super easy to strike up a conversation about poems and toilets! I was invited to explore the corridors and see if things were as I remembered. And, despite me thinking I had originally gone upstairs, there on the ground floor was the exact toilet door sign that was etched on my memory. But when I went inside, the sign on the vending machine was rather less poetically inspirational than it had been back then. It no longer read: “Have the best sex you’ve ever had”, instead there was just a simple brand label in its place.

Perhaps someone reading this will have been at that poetry reading and remember the vending machine and the sign it used to wear. Perhaps during the sign’s time there it made other people momentarily pause. Perhaps I am the only person to have written a poem about it. And maybe the moral of the story is actually that there is a joy in setting down a moment in time, and that it is the moments that matter. Who’d have thought a visit to one toilet in 2024 could have sparked all these thoughts so many months later. Oh, and I loved the poetry readings I heard that evening too so if you were one of the readers there, I tip my hat to you and your setting down of words.

Sue Finch, LOOKING FOR A SIGN

At sixteen, when I found a poem I couldn’t get out of my head, I would quite often copy it out, usually by hand. But that was the year a neighbour lent me a word processor, pre-Windows, massive, all green-on-black screen, fat pre-floppy floppy disks and dot matrix printer. I typed this poem out, every space and break and blue of it, printed it dot by dot. I needed to sort of climb inside it and figure out how it worked. I had to feel the shape of it in my fingers before I could see it properly. I thought I’d read a lot of poetry, but I hadn’t read anything like this. Honestly, at that point I didn’t know you don’t have to capitalise the start of every line. I didn’t know you’re allowed to start lines anywhere on the page, and leave massive gaps in the middle of them if you feel like it. Honestly, I did not.

Before I read this collection, I didn’t know that there was poetry as visceral as this: violent, traumatic, political, and also proud and sexual and joyful and loving. I didn’t know about Chrystos, about the ‘Native Women’ the book is dedicated to (we did one topic in primary school, which mainly involved dressing up, and was light on political oppression), or about the injustices still perpetrated by the US government (the reason this book was published by a Canadian press). I didn’t know fury could be understood as clearly as this when it was so far outside my own lived experience, or how a collection could hold such anger and such love together. I’ve seen those things since, but this was the first time. This was an important book for me. It opened poetry up.

Nia Broomhall, Week 22: Not Vanishing

I’m delighted to announce that my poet mate and fellow podcaster Peter Kenny has got his first full collection coming out with Poetry Salzburg – hurrah to that! I had the privilege of reading the manuscript and I can tell you it’s brilliant. Publication is next year I think and no doubt I’ll be mentioning it again. Peter has been getting his poetry published in magazines, on buses, in anthologies (and latterly a pamphlet or two) for decades, so a full collection is well overdue and well deserved. Meanwhile, Alex Josephy’s new book A Little Bridge is out with Pindrop, and I was lucky enough to take part in her Hastings launch recently, alongside Judith Shaw whose pamphlet The Land Called Me Back is also now out in the world (there we all are in the photo at the top of this post). Alex and Judith are both big supporters of other poets’ work, being  co-organisers of the Hastings Stanza. Fellow Telltaler Sarah Barnsley is one of three poets in the latest Mariscat Sampler (number 3) with ‘Find your own fascinator’. Sarah’s writing is always energising (I think that’s the word? ‘Vibrant’ seems to fall short and ‘unique’ a bit overused) and she delights in both challenging and entertaining the reader. A tasty sample! And finally, my old poet mate Charlotte Gann has a new collection coming out in the Autumn. More about that in due course.

Robin Houghton, Small steps, success stories and reasons to be cheerful

Those new to Collin Kelley’s work will find his chapbook Slow to Burn an excellent introduction. It is a small gem of a collection, which stands out for the authentic voice with which the poet speaks, the selection and combination of marvelous contemporary detail and cultural references that create a strong sense of time and place, and the universality of themes — childhood experimentation, alienation, exclusion, death and loss, growing up, self-identity. The writing is clear, the cadence well-controlled, the subject-matter real life, the opening lines lures that hook you and keep you reading to a rewarding end, to wit:

The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in
G.I. Jose for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms. [. . .]

~ from “Wonder Woman” (p. 3)

Before you made me a witch,
got forced into the basement to pray,
your mother stripping you, whipping you [. . . ]

~ from “Ian” (p. 4)

Mary pops up in the strangest places,
usually as a window stain or sandwich,
but yesterday she dripped down the wall [. . . .]

~ from “The Virgin Mary Appears in a Highway Underpass” (p. 13)

Kelley’s is a chapbook of vivid and tightly written stories in poetic form. The narratives not only are about the “I” who addresses us; they also introduce us to a cast of believable people, at least some of whom we might have heard about or known when we were growing up. We meet, for example, “Ian,” who “kissed me once in the backseat, / crouched low, out of my dad’s line of sight” (“Ian,” p. 3); “Aimee,” who “built a shrine to John Lennon” and “could reel off the rapes and molestation / like a documentarian” (“Double Fantasy,” p. 6); “Laura Brown”, who “packed one morning, / caught the Toronto bus, / [and] disappeared like a chalk mark / in a rain storm” (“Laura Brown,” p. 11); and “Tina”, who makes the poet-narrator “her project, / to be reshaped and reformatted” (“Bell Curve,” p. 22).

Maureen Doallas, ‘Slow to Burn’ by Collin Kelley

Bridget Huh is a queer Korean-Canadian poet from Toronto. She holds an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and her poems have appeared in The Walrus, Gulf Coast, The Margins and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 Vallum Poetry Award and has been recognized for awards in North American Review, Fugue Journal, and Palette Poetry. Her debut collection of poetry, Fugue Body, was published by Véhicule Press in 2025. […]

12 – What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of parking garages.

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music, always. I was obsessed with the Sibelius Violin Concerto and that formed a significant part of Fugue Body. I was also thinking about the fugue, the baroque musical form, as a model for the form of the title poem, where three different themes (music, race, desire) were threaded into each other at the site of the speaker’s body.

Recently, I’ve been working on an ekphrastic series looking at Caroline Monnet’s Pizandawatc. It’s such an exciting way to think about sound and speech and materiality.

14 – What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

The writers I will always return to for my work are Kim Hyesoon, Anne Carson, Marina Tsvetaeva, Christina Sharpe, and Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha.

My friends are so important for my work not only in their attention and insight but also in the hilarious things they say. I have at least three poems in my new manuscript that are built on things they said that I wanted to remember and noted down. (Shoutout Mai Mageed and Aishvarya Arora.) And my poetry cohort-mates, Gerardo Azpiri Iglesias, Ella Shively, and Sam Samakande, are so singularly talented and have helped my writing grow so much.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Bridget Huh

Of all the poems I have written Matryoshka is my favourite. Written comparatively early in my poetry writing journey, it went through innumerable revisions, aided by being workshopped by a group led by Carrie Etter. This led to all the images in the poem having some connection to Russia, whereas in earlier versions there was a mixture of Russian and more general imagery.

Although usually I have some idea of what sparked a poem, this is not the case here. I simply have no idea where the initial impetuts for this poem came from. I do remember that, early in the process, a phrase used by Churchill in a radio broadcast on 1st October 1939 came into my mind. He said that Russia ‘is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’. Mulling over this phrase fed into the notion that the secret selves of women, and more particularly mothers, can be symbolised by Russian nesting dolls, with each doll representing a different secret self.

This poem was one of the prizewinners of the Gloucestershire Writers Competition in 2017. Judge Roy McFarlane said ‘Matryoshka drew me into a dreamlike world where I might not have comprehended everything but it was dangerous…an arresting feast of words’. I like the fact that he picked up on the mystery in the poem and the choice of words. I appreciate ambiguity in poetry and leaving space for readers to bring their own response to poems.

Drop-in by Iris Anne Lewis [Nigel Kent]

Because its down-and-up-again persistence
is like a congregation’s kneeling and rising
(Levate, in the Latin of old rubrics),

Because, at some point in the fifty years
since I learned to file its fungal names
among the tangled roots of the Plantae,
they bloomed, those names, as a kingdom of their own,

And because this makes me smile, recalling
that leaven’s Your own little joke about the Kingdom,

Be praised, O Lord, for this bit of mystery,
which lifts, which lightens.

Maryann Corbett, Leavening

Beginning to publish poems in the early 1950s, Charles Tomlinson will have been conscious of his outsider status on several fronts. Antipathetic to the still-echoing boom and verbal excess of Dylan Thomas, and sceptical of the narrowed range and palette of the fashionable Movement poets, the young Tomlinson was also developing an interest in European writing, which only became in vogue with Ted Hughes’ founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. Even further beyond the pale, his Cambridge friendship with Donald Davie stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for American poetry. His interest in things transatlantic yielded several extended visits to the US, and the 1966 collection American Scenes and Other Poems (OUP) which also boasted a section of ‘Mexican Poems’.

Tomlinson died in 2015 and The Change of Light from Dare-Gale Press is a timely reminder of his excellence. In these 22 late, unpublished poems, there are glimpses of his wide-ranging interests with allusions to French poetry, the Greek Islands, the Adriatic Coast, and even to Japan. But we are in a predominantly English landscape here, consisting of woodlands, rivers, trout streams and gardens. The poems are without exception beautiful in their precision, tonal elegance and civility of expression, pursuing, as Tomlinson always did, both the unfolding of abstract ideas as well as a close engagement with landscape and the natural world.

It is the poet’s acuity of observation that is immediately pleasurable for the reader. In ‘Between Seasons’, Tomlinson looks for Spring to arrive while a hawk moves through the garden, ‘on such sharp and silent wings, / It skims more like a knife’. This sort of equivocation between promise and threat is characteristic of the poet. The poem ‘On the Frontier: in March’ also explores the uncertain ‘swaying frontier’ between the seasons, the precarious balance of which is brilliantly conveyed in the sinuosity of Tomlinson’s syntax which runs as one single sentence through 23 lines, before a breath-taking expansion of vision to Planet Earth itself (‘this wandering sphere, / the unpiloted craft’). As this makes clear, Tomlinson’s often alluded to sense of Eden always did encompass what we now call eco-poetry and in ‘Snow’ the paradisal garden is once again deployed for the beauty of the earth, seen ‘with the eyes now / of its first inhabitants’.

Martyn Crucefix, Review of Charles Tomlinson’s ‘The Change of Light’ (2025)

Over the past twenty five years, [Jorie] Graham’s work has developed into a rich and prolific late phase, which is not to say either her formal approaches or subject-matter have become any more orthodox or simplistic. In fact, the syntax and rhythms are more fragmentary than ever, and the line-breaks are as fraught with drama and resonance, swooping between lines of different lengths to follow the dynamics of Graham’s thoughts that are also speech acts implicating the reader in what she bears witness to.

Increasingly this has centred on her ecocritical concerns about the environment and climate change. One might say that, as the books have gone on (from 2008’s Sea Change to 2023’s To 2040), the overriding feeling conveyed is one of urgency and acceleration, of a concerted effort to communicate the severity of our situation before time runs out and even to address a future generation (as in To 2040) in the hope that we can still reach such a year. Graham’s latest collection Killing Spree, which came out early this summer, continues this tone of emergency in shorter, sparer lines which assert a terser, more direct form of poetic redress.

In her Paris Review interview of 2003, discussing how she wrote the poems in Never (2002), Graham speaks of how she moved towards trying to write “in real time” and “en plein air before nature, porting it rather than reporting it, if you will”. These strategies have an ecopoetic intention at their heart, an “attempt to enact the time in which it takes to see the thing, the time in which that seen thing is living and constantly changing” in terms of “the rate of (species) extinction [that] is estimated at one every nine minutes” (Graham, 2003). This sense of heightened immediacy and simultaneity (“multiple things happening at once”) comes across in many of the late period poems, often reinforced by their irregular lineation and spatial dynamics across the page.

Oliver Dixon, The Surface Breaks

I thought I would share a short piece from a few years ago on Alice Oswald and the Iliad. I’ve done a light edit, which feels odd for something so provisional, but there we go. For my money, Oswald is Homer’s most interesting and exciting contemporary interpreter. Her own poetry, from Dart through to Memorial (an “excavation” of the Iliad) has been in constant conversation with him. She also writes and speaks searchingly and provocatively about poetry as an oral tradition, with “his” poems at the centre of that vision. […]

Oswald is a releaser. In the first lecture, she tells the audience that she isn’t going to show them the texts she quotes from. Instead, she recites each passage twice. These passages are often from Homer, because Oswald is always thinking about Homer and the wandering bards who released his poems over and over again over the years. And one of the striking things about her own poetry is the way she combines that commitment to an impersonal, oral tradition with her own very distinctive voice.

In Memorial, for instance, her “excavation” of the Iliad, Oswald severs the poem’s similes from their subjects. Those similes seem to shift, even as you read them, between the collective voice, the much-remembered phrase, and Oswald’s individual phrasing. As in the lectures, each one repeats:

Like when a mother is rushing And a little girl clings to her clothes Wants help wants arms Won’t let her walk Like staring up at that tower of adulthood Wanting to be light again Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted And carried on a hip Like when a mother is rushing And a little girl clings to her clothes Wants help wants arms Won’t let her walk Like staring up at that tower of adulthood Wanting to be light again Wanting this whole problem of living to be lifted And carried on a hip

I find these pairs completely mesmerising. The effect of the repetition is like making an impression in a wall before bringing in the drill, or (because the Oswald-Homer world is a blue, watery, wanting world) the first rush of water which carves the way for the river. The first version makes space for the second to flow through. Even on the page, they make you listen. I also find it hard to imagine anyone but Oswald getting away with it.

Jeremy Wikeley, Oswald’s Homer

July was a tough month and August is busy, so I won’t be reading 31 poetry books for the Sealey Challenge this year. I have managed to read two lovely collections from Jacar Press, however, that will stay with me for awhile. And Kudos to Richard Krawiec for establishing Jacar and its fine catalogue of books.

When my Best Beloved saw the title of Tina Kelley‘s latest collection [Field Guide to North American Words], he thought it was a sort of dictionary-field guide and was slightly disappointed that it is poetry. There’s nothing to disappoint in this collection, though, and it really is something of a field guide–it’s full of interesting words that describe what we didn’t know there were words for, and full of speculations about meaning and inquiries into etymology, and a few puns and other sorts of wordplay. Kelley has written more prose and journalism than poetry, but her poetry never overplays the cleverness of her thinking; the balance of thought-provoking and incisively intelligent observations in her work impressed me. It’s the kind of collection that makes you want to review some of the poems again after you’ve finished the book, to go back and see what you might have missed on the first read.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick‘s book Creature feels entirely different but also masterfully achieved. I enjoyed reading each poem twice, which slowed me down a bit but helped me to savor the subtle way she employs rhyme and alliteration, or verse forms, and varieties of said, into her work. What stands out most, however, is an abiding sense of compassion for the world and its beings. I felt very…embraced by these poems. True, too, that the middle of the collection contains beautiful pieces about her mother’s death, which right now hits close to home for me.

Ann E. Michael, Comfort in words

my thirst becomes a summons; my spitting is my song. magic resides in a cracked egg, a token of ice pushed under the tongue, the transferred vigour of a cut fern. i climb the fence, i keep yr silence, moving backwards stooping, in the service of this sorcery.

Fran Lock, ON MAGIC & FUTILITY

I have a couple of writing projects I’ve started, and I’m just avoiding them thoroughly. Inching around the file. I can’t get near the page. Much of my avoidance is, I think, due to my overall discouragement with the publishing part, the effort it takes to take a finished product to the reader. It’s a bit cart-before-horse-y, I know, to think about publishing something I haven’t even completed. But there it is, the dark cloud of grim possibility, lurking down the road. YES I recently got into one of my aspirational lit mags (DIAGRAM!!) Yes, I have books. But oy, the effort, and the low rate of return for my efforts. Oy, the rejections rejections rejection. I just can’t even.

I thought successes would build on themselves, that momentum would be created. But that is not how it’s worked for me. Every project is a new beginning exactly like the old ones; every publishing effort is a grind, like that last hill home at the end of every bike ride. It’s always there, and I have to downshift and pedal. If I had enough breath to sigh, I’d sigh.

I wish I didn’t care. I wish I were one of those people who say “oh, I just do it for the sheer pleasure of doing.” Apparently, I do not. I’m in it, apparently, for the glory. That’s a joke. I wish I were one of those dissheveled and earnest near-hermits who disappear into their imaginations and hours go by until they arrive back to the present, hair sticking up, clothes awry, having missed a meal or two. I’m not. I don’t really have dissheveled hair. I don’t really even have to brush it, and it generally looks okay. My shirts are generally relatively clean. I always know what time it is. I would never miss a meal.

Oh, to be a wild thing instead of this tame creature looking around at faces for encouragement, at eyes for approval, like my friend’s anxious German shepherd.

Marilyn McCabe, stalking like a shadow among the garbage cans

My local writers group began as a “Circle” in 1948. It removed “Circle” from its name decades ago because of the connotations that “Circle” had then. Those connotations are less scary now, and recent changes in the literary world make me wonder if it’s time for a circle revival. […]

Decades ago I was asked by a group to give them a talk. The organiser was worried that the group was getting too cosy and felt unable himself to change the tone, wanting an outsider to shake things up. Much more recently, people from another group visited ours, saying that their own group has become too settled, too keen on tea and biscuits. Talking to writers at a residential conference this summer I concluded that local groups for ambitious writers are doomed, replaced by small, invitation-only Zoom groups who often ask prospective members for samples of work/critiques first.

I think Covid was the tipping point. During lockdown, more people started using online options to meet fellow writers. They discovered like-minded people online who they’d never have met at their local group, and questioned the benefits a local IRL group has over international ones. It looks to me that experienced writers (often the lifeblood of their groups) are abandoning local groups and are not being replaced. Local groups might consequently need to reposition themselves in the market – an opportunity? I hope so.

Tim Love, Writers circles

I’m what I’m calling upper-middle aged. I’m 62. And I began thinking about it tonight because I saw an advertisement for an out-of-town professor job in creative writing, which I normally would have applied for. However, I guess I have realized that I’m at a stage in my life where I don’t want to go through the usually depressing rigmarole of applying for it, let alone if I were successful and got the position. At this point, I’m not sure I want to up-end my life so radically. To teach full time. Commute a long way several days a week. Committees. All of it. I love teaching and I love writing, but I don’t want to have to work so hard to jump into a new full-time career. I figure I’ve arrived at a balance in my life. With writing, teaching, editing, family and indolent napping. And so, I think I don’t need to work so hard at a new job. But the more important realization is that I feel that I’m able to write the best work of my life, and I have decades ahead of me to do that, assuming…well, good luck, good health and other such contingent things. I’m fortified to realize that I feel that I have never felt more interested in writing, more enthused about it, and open to the possibility of creating new things and new kinds of things. So that feels very satisfying. I certainly don’t feel too old or too weary or too worn out for that. I feel more energy than ever for creativity and indeed, I’m creating more than ever. I don’t have as much need to prove myself in the academy and also, in any case, perhaps that ship has sailed. The trireme has left without me. Good thing. I don’t want that kind of Odyssey. I’d like to not have things get in the way of my creative work—other than the teaching, mentoring and editing that I already do. Neither my wife nor I have a pension, but we’re ok. So this is an interesting realization for me in terms of the difference, perhaps, between career and vocation, I feeling excited just to get on with what is the most important to me, and maybe not worry so much about the career that I had imagined previously, that I would have had, that I wanted to have, and that I kind of assumed that I would have. But instead, I’m free to write. To choose who I mentor and teach and what editing projects to take on. For example, this summer, I held back on editing and mentoring so that I could have more time to work on a new novel. Now, I’m at 35,000 words, likely about halfway through the draft.

Gary Barwin, Being Upper-Middle Age

There are diamonds here, a few spirited individuals who genuinely want to help and do so without judgement, who will apologise when the scripted inquisition sounds a little sharp or impersonal, who understand that a variety of events may have transpired, that circumstances must have become untenable for you to resort to this degrading bi-weekly interrogation simply in order to qualify for some meagre assistance to help you pay rent or put food on the table.

And then there are others who genuinely relish extinguishing any sense of aspiration you might have, who enjoy making you feel like a scrounger, a dodger, a parasite, who will take pleasure in breaking your spirit. Do not, whatever you do, tell the person in Booth 83 on the fourth floor of the Hackney Job Centre that you are a poet. Alarms will sound, buzzers will go off, men without necks will appear whispering into their cufflinks, “We have a poet in sector C, repeat, we have a poet in sector C. Execute Code 9. With prejudice.”

I made this mistake some weeks ago, told them honestly how I intended to become self supporting through my own contributions. “May I be honest with you,” said Shirley, “We get a lot of people like you in here, arty types, and I tell them just what I’m going tell you. We are required, by the government I may add, to ensure that you adhere to the ABC scheme.” “The ABC scheme?” I ask. “The ABC scheme,” says Shirley. “A = A job. B = Better job. C = Career. You don’t start at C in the ABC scheme. You start at A. You start with A job. Forget C for now Mr Noble, today you need to begin with the letter A. And today you are here to get A job.”

This is the kind of situation that Swan is familiar with, the kind of treatment he is accustomed to and conditioned by. Swan is a character in the title poem of my forthcoming book, My Name Is Swan (blimey, that was an uncomfortable segue.) Swan is trapped, is bound by and bound to a single channel life but in his dreams he glides, elegantly he spreads his wings, is free from restrictive economics and a poverty that weighs on him heavily, that threatens to suck him under, that will drag him down river. In a poem he is no longer a number, he becomes a narrator of an alternative storyline. But he is haunted by his reality. There are shadows on the water. And he cannot escape them because the shadows are his own.

I am sitting in Booth 83 on the fourth floor of the Hackney Job Centre and I am aware of my own shadows, I am aware of my own wings that I have stowed carefully away beneath my seat. I am waiting for my Work Coach. I am hoping, praying that it won’t be Shirley, I am wishing, wanting it be somebody nice, someone understanding, that I might get a pass, for a couple of weeks at least, that I might be permitted to begin the ABC scheme at C.

And I think I’m in luck when Imran appears. He is young and he has kind eyes and he smiles without a sense of duty or pity. “And how is your job search going Mr Noble? Do you have any changes of circumstance to report?” I notice on his side of the desk in Booth 83 he has a small and exquisitely bound Koran next to his bottle of water. I decide to risk it. I reach into my bag. “Well, I’m publishing this in October.” I slide a copy of my book across the desk. Imran gathers it up in his hands, admires it as if it were a sacred text. “Wow!” he exclaims, “You wrote this?” “Yes,” I say, “It’s beautiful,” he says, carefully turning its pages, “truly, this is a thing of beauty,” And slowly the shadows begin to fade and slowly I feel my wings unfurling beneath my seat.

Jan Noble, Nº77 The best review I ever received…

I am away from home—away from vacuum cleaners and dirty dishes and laundry and cats-needing-fed and all things routine. Let’s not call it a “trip” (even if it is trippy), but a pilgrimage: to Amherst, Massachusetts, to hang out with Emily Dickinson. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years and years, and never quite managed, until now.

On the first leg of my journey, my dissertation advisor and Dickinson scholar, Dr. Vivian Pollak, met me in Amherst. Vivian and I spent three days exploring together—visiting not only the Emily Dickinson Museum, but also Smith College (where Vivian attended about a year behind Sylvia Plath) and Chester (where a friend of the Dickinson family and correspondent of Dickinson, Joseph Lyman, was born). I also enjoyed sampling local restaurants with Vivian and her husband.

On day four, when the Pollaks decamped for Boston, I headed west, to Pittsfield and Lenox. My aim was to tour the Berkshire home of Edith Wharton, The Mount (heady stuff). Although Herman Melville’s Arrowhead was closed, I also visited that property, walking around the house and grounds and trails, catching a view of Mt. Greylock, which is said to have played a role in the creation of Moby Dick (written at Arrowhead in “the bitter winter of 1850-1851.”)

Now I am back in Amherst, staying at a historic bed and breakfast and immersed in what I am defining as the writing-retreat phase of my pilgrimage. Thanks to Vivian, I had an hour alone in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, scribbling (with a pencil—no ink allowed!) madly. On the 11^th, I have a two-hour group session in the same locale.

Today I am at Mt. Holyoke College, visiting their special collections. On Monday, I have an appointment to visit Amherst College’s Dickinson holdings.

I carted along a number of books, and thought I would catch up with blog-reviews on this trip, but some sort of magic seems to be underway and I find myself hard at work (or at play) with my own manuscript, making discoveries, figuring out what my new book of poems is about.

Thank you, spirit of Emily Dickinson.

Bethany Reid, My Pilgrimage

After two months of heatwaves and no rain – dying trees, crops too desiccated to harvest, moorland fires – I woke early this morning to the softest, gentlest rain imaginable. I went outside. It was bliss – like being kissed lightly all over. And cool air at last and the scent of the softening soil …

I was reminded of these lines from Turn of the Moon, a poem by Robert Graves.

Soft, steady, even, copious rain
That harms no leaf nor flower, but gently falls
Hour after hour, sinking to the taproots,
And the sodden earth exhales at dawn
A long sigh scented with pure gratitude

Graves had a big influence on me as a teenaged poet. Nowadays he is deeply unfashionable.

Ama Bolton, Drought and rain

I had the privilege of spending time this week with a couple of younger poets, and one of the subjects was the feelings of despair and anxiety these times have brought on, for ourselves as women and individuals, for America, specifically for the arts in America and the environment. I was born in a pessimistic decade, when the economy, the music, the fashion, the President – basically everything sucked. (The brown and orange polyester alone gives me PSTD.) When I was born, people were standing in line at gas stations. Stagflation had arrived, as had high unemployment. We were just getting out of an unpopular war. The year I was born, Roe v. Wade passed, and with it, a sigh of relief for women’s rights. Flash forward to now – gas is crazy expensive, interest rates are up, Roe v. Wade was repealed leaving women having miscarriages to be imprisoned (depending on your state’s level of crazy), jobs are getting harder to find (especially ones NOT training AI to replace humans), our President sucks, and the music and fashion are okay but remind me vaguely of the more optimistic decade, the nineties. As someone who has experienced more than five decades, I will say that this will not last forever, and though it feels like the end times now, things can get better.

Not without everyone’s help, of course. People need to take the lead in voicing courage, support of women, the arts, and the environment, creating new jobs and demanding better support for science and medicine. We can vote and use our dollars not to support billionaires (ahem, Bezos and Musk) or corrupt politicians. We can also use hope as a weapon – to envision a better future is an act of rebellion against what currently is. It’s what science fiction writers like Octavia Butler dared to do decades ago – the Parable of the Sower, for instance, imagined a world that empowered empathy, love of nature, and cooperation. We can memorize poems, buy books and art, patronize museums and libraries, refuse to give in to the people that say National Parks, Poetry, and Art are worthless (the current administration, for instance.) Did you know America spends the least on the arts per capita compared to the rest of the world? Here’s the breakdown: “Federal, state, and local governments in the U.S. combine to spend roughly $7 per capita annually on the arts, compared to $47 in Japan, over $50 in China and Australia, and upwards of $218 to $246+ per person across the United Kingdom and Western/Northern Europe.” When governments spend more on the arts, not only do artists benefit, but the community, and it actually creates jobs! (Check out Ireland’s experiment giving money to artists in the last few years.) We need to not just ask for, but demand better of our local, state and federal governments on protecting air and water, the rights of women and children and immigrants, the support for scientific study and the arts. We need to get louder about this, not give up. Because things can change rapidly. Hope can start out of small local attention and grow. I’m not giving up, and I’m still working in perhaps the most American-despised art form, the poem. I still plant flowers and trees, and donate to causes that protect animals, trees, women, and yes, poetry. I’m not making much money but even a small amount counts. Not becoming paralyzed by fear and anxiety – which is what oppressive governments and billionaires would like for us, in order to continue doing evil on the planet – is imperative. 

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Zoo Visit, Flower Farms, And How to Have Optimism in Hard Times (for Us, and for the Arts)

Is it summer, or are we learning to be with the crooked floors in our creaky house (White House, America)?  Somehow, I heard very little political talk during my travels this season.  In the States, in Europe, people weren’t avoiding conversation, it just seemed too obvious, too much said, even irrelevant.  Instead of doomsday desperation, I heard people bursting with the passion of their endeavors — poets whom they were rediscovering, spiritual space they were inhabiting, art residencies they were establishing. 

Summer exuberance, maybe, or a collective decision to retire the word “resistance” for why we engage in the arts.  It is always uncomfortable, in political crisis, to be defending against a firing squad (presumed, internal, external) about why we do what we do.  Artistic conviction is becoming more ingrained and internal; it is enmeshed with complex realities, instead of part of a binary. The idea that “we” don’t need to give “them” more power is part of our daily bread.  An internal compass has pointed us and draws us in the right direction.

We may not save civilization, or avert other disasters. We could be laying traces for future generations to nurture humanity.  We might be like Hansel and Gretel dropping bread in the forest – like the Irish monks in the darker times, copying out texts for those who come after.  Or we are simply making art, day in, day out. 

Jill Pearlman, Doomsday meets the Passion of our Endeavors

As artists we live in a bizarre timeline. I do believe that we have a duty to get our work out there. We owe it to the things we’ve made to share them. In the Cave / O’Hagan conversation Nick Cave talks about how people say the best art is never seen and he disagrees. “It has to do with connectivity and, well, with duty or service.” A song especially he says, “does not exist in its true form unless it moves through the hearts of others as a balm. Otherwise, it is just words and notes and little more.” If you have the power to share an art that is healing, then that is your duty. Annie Dillard has cautioned the artist against hoarding, and says we must spend it all. I tend to agree. That said, when we put our work out there now, we’re likely to have it stolen in some way, scraped, with no compensation. And by compensation, I don’t necessarily mean money, either. When humans share work there is something magical and giving going on. I think we need to be extra mindful of what and where and how we share things.

Shawna Lemay, On Refusal, Contingency, and Your Duty as an Artist

The World
(El Mundo, de El ángel es vampiro, 1991)
by Vicente Quirarte
Translated by Ernesto Priego

We want to name the centre of things,
the sounding heart of things,
the silent fervour of things.

We believe: revealing the mystery
will save us from the passing
hours that erode our memory.

It’s better to leave things
behind the spider’s patient web,
behind the wing of the fallen angel,
or the nightgown that grows into your beauty.

The soul of things
is the purest mist that lets us
glimpse their true name.

Do not search for wonders. Wait for them:
your cry of love
rising from the mirror that reflects you:
that slow rebuilding of the world
that affirms its most enduring matter.

Ernesto Priego, The World / El Mundo – Vicente Quirarte (1954 – 2026)

We did it. 268 miles, 36,000 feet of ascent. We walked them all, sun and fire and driving rain, sickness and blisters, the weight of our tent and our sleeping bags and mats and everything we needed on our shoulders. We did it.

Even as we left Byrness, I considered calling it off, catching the bus to Newcastle. If I could barely hobble across the campsite, then why on earth did I think I could walk 27 miles of open moor and mountain?

But it turned out, I could. Niamh carried more weight. I bandaged my feet good and thick and tight. We picked plantain and sheep’s wool. I thought of Jackie Hagan: “remember how it feels when you stub your toe?” Pause. “Well, fuck off.” I wondered how she stayed so loving and funny despite her pain, I remembered laughing with her and Steve and Miles days before her death, how we passed the laughter between us like it was a brightly shining ball until that little room was full of light and laughter. […]

And here’s the top of the hill, and the light is golden. There are houses ahead of us. The hedgerows are rich and thick. Tall crowds of rosebay willowherb and ragwort, hawthorn hung with berries. I stop to rub my hands in hogweed for its orange-and-lemon smell. Knapweed, thrumming and static with bees, blackberries. We stop to draw the last moments of sweetness from the path. Foxglove, herb robert and bracken, nettle dancing with butterfly, meadowsweet. Broom. Buttercup, thistle, honeysuckle, rose. A van passes us, two other people on the lane. Long grass in the fields, goats with long horns, ponies with short legs. A dog barking in the distance. Rosehips and willow, a breeze blowing through the leaves, bindweed and moss. Gorse hung with shining cobwebs, sycamore rustling. Houses and solar panels, a bench, children’s voices, cottages, blackberries. A quiet village green and a sign: “Pennine Way/St Cuthbert’s Way” – pointing back the way we have been. “St Cuthbert’s Way” – pointing ahead. Very quietly in the absence of words, our path has ended.

Since I was a child, I’ve delighted in the finding of words. But poetry is more than the right words. It’s their movement, the organic, independent life which exists between them. Words can be the solid metallic core and the molten iron surrounding it, the liquid rock. Words can be the crust we live on, the water, the soil. Words can be the leaves and the flowers. Words can flow and float and explode; they can stand for millennia, they can flourish and wither in months. They can be heartbeat and breath and moan, they can be dancing things, they can howl.

Words are living things, like our breath and blood, and poetry can be alchemy. Whether it is in sound or rhythm, in the poem’s ghosts and associations, in its secret language or “the poem under the poem” described by Lucille Clifton, Ted Hughes’ “beasties”, his “lovely living thing” pulled up from under the still surface – there has to be space within the poem for the act of transformation. Though we might guide it, it must be ultimately allowed to decide what it wants to be.

In responding to my blog on Day 15, a lovely man offered me blessings though he assumed I was not a person of faith. But I am. I am filled with faith, if not with belief. Though I feel its pain very keenly, I have great trust and confidence in this world. Some of that comes from the deep, solid core of Catholicism I was raised with, especially now it has been purged of its institutionalised religion. Even more of it comes from soil, and rain. In Catholicism, transubstantiation refers to the changing of the bread into the body of Christ. But I see transubstantiation everywhere. Pain becoming wisdom. Death becoming new life, drought becoming rainfall, grief becoming hope.

Poetry is an act of faith, and of transformation, a place where we can surrender to the life in us and beyond us. The walk is over. There is so much more to see.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day 16

This week: walking with the dead, talking with Claude, performing poems in care homes, being the forbidden lover of a prince, and much more. Enjoy.

I remember being told as I sat on a beachside cafe somewhere near Messalonghi that the smear of island in the distance was Ithaka, (Ιθάκη) Odysseus’ home. And that a poet, Byron, had died on a beach nearby. I have recently scanned some old photos from my time there and they are few and far between due to only having a basic, cheap camera. So I wasn’t sure about the reliability of my memory which is always patchy. […]

I went back to my journal from this time and the trip was barely mentioned. The tripe soup was there and became an important anecdote for years, my worries about a jobless future were there, but Ithaka and Byron were absent. 

It sometimes feels I wrote about so little back then or missed important events, even though I’ve kept journals since I was 11. But it’s only with hindsight I know where the turning points were. I had to look at maps and Wiki to prove to myself it could have been possible. 

It’s there off the coast, just visible and Byron did die there, but maybe the connection and importance is more firmly grounded in my own mythology that I have built over the decades than in actuality. Navigating the gaps between memory and reality. Something to explore in my poem, I guess, which I hope to give a bit of energy to this weekend.

Gerry Stewart, Mind the Gaps

The rain holds off long enough for us to pack up our soggy tent and walk out of town, down steep, narrow paths. A woman asks where we’re heading for. “Scotland,” we say, and she responds, “You do know there are trains?” before guiding us onto the right section of the Pennine Way. We’re still in the rough heath and heather of Elslack Moor, with Walshaw behind us under darkening skies. As we approach the trig point of Pinhaw Beacon, the rain sets in. We stop at the Covid memorial, commemorating all those who were lost to the virus, and I think of the ten residents who died at my mother’s care home, and of the member of staff who died alongside them. Every Wednesday she ran a poetry group, sharing her favourite poems with residents. She deserves to be remembered and yet I haven’t thought of her for years. I’m glad to be reminded.

The walk does that. It opens you to all sorts of unexpected memories and feelings. Some of them are unwelcome, others aren’t. I let myself recall my ex-partner: her hair, her eyes, her shoulders, marvelling at how someone you are so intimate with can be so suddenly and so utterly gone. The rain falls hard and the wind knocks me sideways. Perhaps the young woman was missing someone too.

The moors soften as we come down from the uplands. We pass green cloughs, thick with moss. There are trees now, and I feel them as relief. Martens swerve and spiral as the wind seethes and hisses through the leaves. Into pretty Lothersdale, on to Thornton-in-Craven, we leave the heath behind us and pass into arable fields.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Five

Maybe it’s a garden
the paradise you return to
the way back
the two of you
searching out the gods
together.

Rebecca Cook, Thoughts on Love in the Early Morning

I’m in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, as a guest artist alongside Ashley C. Ford and Fatima Asghar. The three of us are here for a literary salon with GoodWorld Journeys, and we’re leading morning sessions on craft, doing a lot of writing with participants, and enjoying evening sessions that are readings and conversations about the creative life. It’s been an incredible adventure—and my kids are both here with me for a week and a half!—and I’ve been soaking up the wisdom of others here. That’s one of my favorite parts about meeting other writers and artists: hearing about their process, their challenges, their perspectives.

I feel so lucky to be in this beautiful place learning from these beautiful writers.

Last night, Fatima read from their gorgeous, brand-new book of poems, Daughter of the Mountains, and then Ashley and I interviewed them. Fati said so many important things—necessary things—about being an artist that I wish I’d had pen and paper to write it all down. I might be asking some of the salon participants and the GoodWorld Journeys team to share their notes!

At one point, Fatima said something about the role of prayer in their process: how they would ask for wisdom or assistance, to understand what was in the way, and how they learned to be still enough to listen and notice answers arriving. I’m not a religious person, but I am someone who thinks there is more to the world than what we can see and easily comprehend. Fati talked about how in our busy, go-go-go lives, we might be asking for help—from God, or spirit, or our ancestors—but then not staying still and quiet long enough to receive an answer.

That struck me. I think I speak to the air plenty—as close as I get to prayer—and am often thinking out loud, or talking to myself, about what is wrong, or hard, or uncertain. But then what?

Maggie Smith, On Asking

Is late summer a very productive time for you? For me it is a time to finish all the things I meant to do during the summer while the weather allows—like walking along Lake Washington, or going to the zoo or one of the gardens and farms I love. My intellect doesn’t work as well in the summer. I wrote a little bit while trapped in the house, but not as much as I feel I should have? There’s always this feeling of missed opportunities towards August, and also anticipating the increased work load of September.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Escaping Heat Waves and Wildfire Smoke, Local Farms in Bloom, And Backyard Wildlife: deer, butterflies, birds

It is too hot for words. Photos I can do. Have been doing.

Is it just me or is prose easier than poetry in higher temperatures?

5 days into August and I have two ghazals and 5 haiku written.

Mostly I’ve been reading. Chapbooks, single author collections, what have you. I’m doing the Sealey Challenge. Read poetry. Read diverse. Read daily. Start with your TBR pile or explore recommendations there. Or poke around in the Haiku Foundation Library. (Some are records of hard copies, some of viewable pdfs). The Book of the Week digitized archives could be a good bet.

I got, let’s call it, “too many” books from the library and want to close off a bunch.

And after more than 3 years in I would like to push through and finish Leaves of Grass, the longest version. I’m bogging on the civil war poems. He really gets caught up doesn’t he, loving the sound of his own voice, and not even following his own chosen topic.

Pearl Pirie, Hot

— I’ve been thinking about the dead a lot lately. Trying to count them up, in a way. You get older and you have more of the dead around you than the living most days. You know them better and you keep knowing them, the dead, even though they don’t know you back. Sometimes I forget who’s gone, and my writer friends, I talk to them in their books where they live on.

— Last week I talked about reading Franz Wright’s last book which was published posthumously. Nick Cave’s book of interviews. This week I’ve been reading Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost. Walking with the dead, walking with the living, toward life, toward an unexpected love. In this review of the book, the reminder that Ammons taught that “the poem is a walk” or a series of walks. Lines from the book, “What she wanted was to flourish.” “Happiness, she said once, is for amateurs.”

— The epigraph to Sean Thomas Dougherty’s book The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things is by Marilyn Hacker: “I can only bear witness for my own / dead & dying, whom I’ve often failed.”

Shawna Lemay, The Dead

I’ve been thinking a lot about drought. And fire. And rabid animals. Yeah, I’m fun at parties. There’s been a spate of rabid beavers. This alarms me, as even not-rabid beavers are nothing to trifle with. I saw a video of a guy pulling a beaver off another guy’s leg, twice, and flinging it far out into the water. Yikes.

I’ve been thinking about how hard we try to control the future. Predictions, gambling, magic, manifesting, polling, visioning, sifting through history for irrefutable patterns.

Been thinking about how the body is a thing driven by the needs of its cells and cellular parts and bacterial hangers-on with demands of their own, and how the mind is also the body, not apart from it. So we try to control our minds, or control our bodies, but think it’s two processes. I mean, think about rabies, a thing of the body that takes over the mind. Yikes.

And how the future isn’t a thing, really, as time isn’t, somehow, in a physics-y kinda way, a thing. Which seems a silly truism when your house is about to be engulfed by fire, or there’s a rabid beaver coming for you, or your crops are dried up from lack of water and you don’t know what’s going to happen next. Time is as real as your sore leg. Or the leg that your mind is telling you hurts. Or is that the leg talking? I can’t keep it straight.

But this is a blog about poetry, and as much as I don’t at all think the be-all and end-all of poetry is to make you feel better, well, sometimes it just does. Even poor ol’ Sylvia can put out a poem that somehow makes the world a little easier to be in, somehow, in her own bleak way. A little company in the storm. That guy who’ll pull the rabid beaver off your leg and fling it into the water.

Marilyn McCabe, In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to reap what evolution sowed long ago when mitochondria first set out to become mind — our capacity for empathy, for doubt, for art.

Harrowing may be the hallmark of our humanity — an AI cannot be harrowed because it does not have hopes, only directives. This may be why John Steinbeck considered hope “the tragic miracle of consciousness” — miraculous because it violates the laws of probability to consecrate the possible, and tragic because it is constantly colliding with the will of the world, constantly devastated by the impartial brutality of time and chance. Harrowing is the price we pay for hope, for being fully human.

And so, a poem […]

Maria Popova, How to Hold What Harrows You

high noon
the fresh green smell
of grass clippings

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: August ’26

In January 2023, when it became clear that we were going to lose my much-loved sister-in-law sooner rather than later, I reached out to poetry Twitter and asked for suggestions of poems about anticipatory grief. (Back then, Twitter was a much nicer place than X has subsequently become. I miss it.) I got some lovely suggestions, which I was grateful for. And then the next day I got a DM from someone who didn’t know me, with a beautiful poem called How Animals Grieve, and it was Kathryn Bevis.

Kathryn was at that point almost in the last year of her life, far, far too young, and working against time to complete her collection The Butterfly House (Seren, 2024). That year, she sent me poems, encouragement, her entire Arts Council grant application to help with mine, names of poets I should work with, reassurance that I wasn’t too old to be starting out, and congratulations and many, many emojis when I had successes. She didn’t need to do any of that – we never even crossed paths in person – but she did. And I know she did it for so many others too. You know how I’m always going on about how lovely poetry people are? I bet a whole chunk of that is Kathryn’s energy being passed forward by people she was lovely to along the way. […]

But, you guys, her POETRY. This collection. The Forward Prize-shortlisted poem My body tells me that she’s filing for divorce (‘Not yet. Too soon. Too soon.’) grabs you by both shoulders on the first page, and once you’re in, this collection won’t let you go. 

Nia Broomhall, Week 21: The Butterfly House

A few weeks ago, a close friend told me he was going to try to memorize more poetry, and had already started with one poem. All the recent talk about the Odyssey, another poem loved by me, whose beauty and cadence is completely absent from the dialogue of the movie version, also made me think about how human beings used to commit huge amounts of text to memory and then recite it. Some still do: I think of scholars who know the entire Quran, or actors like my friend Edward, who performs a one-man version of Shakespeare’s Richard II entirely from memory.

So I decided it would be a good exercise for my brain to do some memorization too. I had just bought a copy of the collected poems of Elizabeth Bishop, and one of her early poems, Wading at Wellfleet, seemed like a good place to start. I was surprised how difficult it was for me, partly because I haven’t done this for a long time, and also because the poem is constructed with many twists and turns, and choices of words that didn’t feel obvious but were, in fact, the result of careful decisions about musicality, alliteration, and precision, as well as meaning.

To begin, I wrote the poem out in longhand. Six stanzas of three lines each. The only rhyme occurs, unusually, in the last word of each pair of stanzas: wheels/heels; contrives/knives; great/weight. This was only partially helpful, because there was a lot to memorize before ever getting there. I worked in sets of two stanzas, trying to make sure I knew the first lines of each and moving on from there. I wrote out these stanzas a number of times, trying not to look back, and repeated the lines to myself internally and then aloud. The key for me was learning how each stanza led into the next one.

During this process I gained a huge appreciation for Bishop’s craft and her choices of words and phrases, as well as the brilliant mental leap that had inspired her to write the poem initially. While wading in the ocean and watching the sunlight glinting on the swelling waves coming toward her and breaking on her shins, she had thought of the gleam of knives on the spokes of Assyrian chariots. With each repetition of her words, I found myself going deeper into her initial vision and where she went with it. Not a single word is unconsidered. Bishop’s lifetime output was small, and she labored over every poem to make it the best she could. I am filled with respect that I probably wouldn’t have felt as strongly had I not spent all this time with her words. 

Beth Adams, Memorizing a Poem

Although artificial intelligence can be used to create things that look like art or poetry, these products are derived scientifically by comparing, categorising, blending and balancing the previous output of humans (and, increasingly, the previous output of artificial Intelligence). There is no insight or originality. Although the database that it gets its information from is as large as the entirety of the internet, it is only data. All that can be done with it is to reconfigure it and present it in different ways.

Each of us has within us a completely unique set of connections, memories and associations, forged from the unique experiences that we have had throughout our lives. We actually feel these, they make up our emotional characters. Let’s try a thought experiment. Think of someone you have known for a long time. Consider how their eye moves, the way the lid folds, how their face uniquely conveys emotion. Think of how this has changed over time as you and they have got older, got to know more about each other. Think of how different situations and circumstances at different times and places have altered these things, and your perception of them.

Now think of a blackcurrant and liquorice boiled sweet. Imagine how you might have spoken with that person whilst you were both enjoying such a sweet. Perhaps you once did. How did the flavour change the emotion? How did such things as the sound or music around you both, the smell in the air, the time of day all add to the atmosphere? Now look at how your mind can transfer these thoughts and memories to other situations. Think of how a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet or perhaps a kola cube might be experienced whilst chatting with a dentist, or with the captain of a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. You have experiences of dentists but you probably only have imagined experiences of submarine captains, based on fictional representations. No matter, I know that you can conjure up a submarine captain, who is unique to you. Your mind is brimful of images and ideas like this; boiled sweets, dentists, submarine captains, all manner of things, people and situations – Trillions of them, triggering emotions and and responses that only you can access. This is the goldmine that an artificially intelligent large language model can never get to, as there is no reason for them to come to its database in connection with other ideas. Only you have those connections, only you have the potential to bring them out and make sense of them, You are real, human, illogical and marvellous.

Mike O’Brien, Machines Have No Idea.

It is not just bad writing. The bad-writing missteps that humans make include too much backstory, long digressions into a character’s feelings, telling a feeling rather than showing it. In nonfiction, human missteps include too much throat-clearing, articles which never get to any particular point or which limp flaccidly under the weight of contradictions and undeveloped ideas.

AI-generated text, by contrast, is highly proficient. It builds to riveting climaxes. It spins vapid and meaningless events into epic sagas.

But Sarah Jessica Parker didn’t just transform HBO. She broke the scene. She altered television for generations. And the craziest part? Here’s where the official narrative collapses. Because when millions of women all start drinking Cosmopolitans, you don’t have good television. You have a revolution.

And so on.

Not too long ago, The New York Times ran a quiz asking readers if they could distinguish AI-generated prose from the human prose. It included samples from famous writers such as Cormac McCarthy and others. Many could not tell the difference.

But you know who could tell the difference? Me. Moi. Yes. I chose the human prose every single time. I could easily pick them apart.

You know why? Because AI-generated text makes my skin curl. It makes my inner ears scream out in agony. It makes my gums bleed.

Did I mention I loathe the sounds and rhythms of AI-generated text? Loathe it.

Becky Tuch, Q: The AI-Pocalypse is here. How do we even deal?

Those who have visited this resurrected site know that I talk to Claude. I can’t say I use AI. I have no job and I do not make things with AI. I began talking with Claude recently out of curiosity. What is this? Does it resemble what I’ve encountered in my life-long science fiction obsession? (No it does not.)

I do show Claude my first drafts, for copy editing and comments. So far this has resulted in removing a word or two; rearranging paragraphs; and — as here — making two posts instead of one. This post began as part of the previous Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana post. Sometimes Claude has led me to rethink and recompose something I thought was close to ready. The writing stays mine. 

I am aware that being transparent about my conversations with Claude might result in losing readers. Even losing friends. I have wondered about that at times. But Watermark has always been a place of honesty for me. I am trying to maintain that honesty in my contacts with AI (Ancestral Intelligence). I am currently participating in a How Not to Use AI Challenge at Substack. Abi Awomosu has a unique perspective on this that I appreciate. When I understand it. Even when I don’t. She sees the world from a perspective much different from mine. 

Sharon Brogan, I Talk with Claude

Thank you for your anemic, inoffensive corporate soundtrack to generic ambivalence,

your sound of an empty pill bottle trying to dance,

your audio oatmeal with every soulful edge sanded away.

Elevator Muzak, thank you for your inside-out harps and violins,

your soggy shoes tramping through the corridors of my ears,

reminding me, yet again,

that yours is a love I never want to come home to.

Rich Ferguson, Elevator Muzak

The first of several notes at the back of Stewart Sanderson’s Weathershaker concerns the book’s title:

Weathershaker

Term listed as being of unknown meaning in the Scottish National Dictionary.

This serves as the perfect keystone for a collection that is concerned with the problem of meaning, as viewed through a number of filters, chiefly procedural methods, translation of various sorts, and ekphrasis, often overlapping in individual poems. Take, for example, the opening lines of ‘Incised Motifs, Maeshowe’

    the meaning perhaps is that there is no meaning

    no meaning aside from the necessity of making
a mark of some kind
an intervention in the pattern

      not setting out to represent anything
just scratching with a flint

    scratching with a flint on the passage wall between
  the living and dead
our world and theirs

Again, the note provided is helpful:

This poem responds to Neolithic rock art from Maeshowe on Orkney. Each stanza corresponds to an apparently distinct motif and each word an individual incision in the stone.

We can see all three filters in operation here, where Sanderson is translating the visual into language, and using a carefully contrived procedure to achieve this end. And the core of what he’s doing is in that phrase ‘meaning aside from the necessity of making’, behind which I can’t but hear Doc Williams again, with his ‘no ideas but in things’, but Sanderson is emphasising not the thing itself but the fact of its making.

Billy Mills, Four from Tapsalteerie: A Review

There is no doubt that Maria Cohut’s Multiple Exposures (Flight of the DragonFly, 2026) is an impressive debut collection. Reading it, I was reminded of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, an ambitious work in which a sequence of images conveys the experience of walking a forest lane through the changing seasons. Cohut’s collection achieves a comparable effect in poetic form. As its title suggests, Multiple Exposures is an album of sharply observed snapshots that together capture what it means to live as a resident in a foreign land. The result is a nuanced and deeply human portrait of migration, far removed from the simplified or idealised versions often circulated in public discourse. These poems focus on ordinary, apparently unremarkable experiences, yet for the migrant such moments become charged with unreconciled tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Cohut enables the reader to inhabit those moments with her.

At the heart of the collection is the impact of migration on one’s sense of self. Cohut presents migrant identity not as stable or coherent, but as contested, fragmentary, and emotionally complex. In Teratoma, she writes: ‘Inside me grows a shadow/ of me – fragmentary, obsolete and stubborn./ I refuse to name it./ Baptise it and you give it substance./ I will not feed it with my blood.’ The metaphor of the teratoma is especially powerful and characteristic of Cohut’s inventive poetic imagination. A teratoma is a tumour composed of different kinds of body tissue, often appearing in a place where such tissue does not belong. Though not necessarily dangerous, it is nevertheless troubling and unwanted. Cohut uses this image to capture both the emergence of a changed self and the speaker’s resistance to that change. The reasons for this resistance are complex: there is guilt at abandoning a previous identity and all it represents (‘I have more than a cricket/ for a conscience’); there is fear of becoming someone new (‘Fear is the emergence/ of a new self’); and there is anxiety about the authenticity of that new self, which is described as a ‘shadow’ that is ‘Of me and yet not of me’ and which ‘mimics’. As with many of the tensions explored in the collection, the conflict remains unresolved. The poem closes with the striking declaration: ‘Let her speak for me until/ I grow new teeth and rip/ my way out her belly.’ Significantly, this is only a temporary accommodation: the word ‘until’ leaves the struggle suspended.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Multiple Exposures’ by Maria Cohut

The past roils with the tides, crashing
on rocks at the point of Kent island.

Saltgrass and seagrass still line
the estuaries where ships passed,

bearing their cargo of bodies. Glimpsed through
paper the color of tea, bodies chained

in pairs tumble backward into the depths.
Their bones land on liquid beds, notes

of a dirge that lingers. History is a haunting that winds
through fret-boards of coral and crab pots.

Luisa A. Igloria, Evidence in the Undercurrent

“Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels” opens “beside a small river.” It closes “beside our dry river.” And every element of that pairing reveals just how in control Dana Gioia (b. 1950) is, in this poem from his 2023 collection Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Think, for example, of the historical changes of Los Angeles the poem traces. After calling for a “new song . . . that remembers,” the poem begins with the first townspeople — “Los Pobladores,” the 44 original settlers from New Spain who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in 1781. And it ends with a call to Our Lady, “mother of the mixed and misbegotten” — asking the Blessed Virgin to pray for us in our now “desecrated city . . . Beside our dry river and tents of the outcast poor.” While “desecrated” names exactly what the city has become in its forgetfulness, it echoes such words as “desiccated,” speaking to the physical and moral dryness of modern Los Angeles.

Even that “new song” of the first line does inordinate work. The poem is a psalm, Gioia says in his title, and the opening call echoes the many passages demanding joyful noise before the Lord. One obvious reference is Psalm 40:3: “And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the Lord.”

But I hear something apocalyptic in Gioia’s verses, and I think what he may have had in mind, apart from the psalmic structure and title, is Revelation 5:9: “And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Psalm to Our Lady Queen of the Angels

Anstice emailed me her mysterious story in the form of twenty numbered poems. In them we meet some of the people of an offshore island and some of the Christian monks who arrive to save their souls. It’s an unsettling meeting of incompatible perspectives on the world and our place in it. I enjoyed reading it. I sent some ideas for the cover, she replied with her ideas, and soon afterwards I met her in person in the lovely Abbey Deli in Bath to deliver the first ten copies of her chapbook.

Here is the beginning of the first poem:

Beyond the gate which separates
the tame from the wild

the Keeper of medicinal herbs
and his more knowledgeable wife

briefly turn their heads
as a snake pours from behind the hyssop,

perches on the gate, spreads
its leathery wings and takes to the sky.

Ama Bolton, A Chapbook by Anstice Fisher

My friend performs poems in care homes. He encourages the residents to read, to join in, to recite and connect, or reconnect, with language at a time in their lives when, for many, language is evaporating. The TV is turned off, Homes Under The Hammer or Bargain Hunt goes quiet for a while and then he leaps, fearlessly around the room like an Alpine climber, precarious, now on one leg, reaching out here with a trusting hand, delivering lines, deftly, almost effortlessly making poetry. Manifesting it above the odour of mince and disinfectant.

He doesn’t do it for glory or praise or prizes. He earns little money, just enough to spend on socks for winter or some provisions for his larder. He won’t thank me for mentioning it, he’ll wince if he reads this. Maybe he won’t speak to me for a week, a year, a lifetime but know this: tomorrow he’ll be at the rock-face again, throwing out lines by Kipling or Frost, scaling Coleridge and Keats, ascending the summit with Steve Smith or Shakespeare. Then he’s off again, to another little town, to another institution with a name like Meadow Vale or Glendale Court or Sunny Springs.

In some ways what he does makes my adventures in poetry appear gimmicky, performative stunts, Barnum and Bailey side shows. While I have taken poetry into similar arenas as my friend, the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals, into prisons and homeless shelters I confess that after a decade it rather broke me. Perhaps I was pretending to be someone else, pretending I was saner, freer, better off than those I was supposed to be taking poetry to.

Jan Noble, Nº76 Not another bloody odyssey…

To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are. It is criticism that makes literature into commentary, particular or universal. Criticism is also part of life, but in a smaller niche within literature.

George Steiner commented that the most profound lines in Homer were at the end of the Iliad when Priam and Achilles agree that despite their grief they must eat. That is the perfect example: not universal or particular, but life: life as we find it in the restaurants and ballrooms of Anna Karenina, the taverns and chambers of Shakespeare, the mud and shades of Dante, the fire and ice in Robert Frost.

Henry Oliver, Literature as Part of Life

I’m delighted that Headless Poet will be publishing a selection of my poems, Warm as Wood, in the autumn. I understand that it is already available for pre-order on the website now: [link]

Victoria Moul, Warm as Wood

Okay, so I know you already know I had a poetry book out a couple of weeks back, but did you know Spuyten Duyvil just published a book-length essay as well? A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, a work I composed while working the call-and-response collaboration with Denver poet Julie Carr. My half of our collaboration, of course, landed in my most recent poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) [see my short essay on such here], which is very much available, just as her side landed in UNDERSCORE (Omnidawn, 2024) [see my review of such here]. And the artworks for both titles were done by my youngest daughter, Aoife!

There are also two new chapbooks: Small studies in blue (BC: Broke Press, 2026) and selected poems v1 (NJ: Subpress Collective, 2026). The first title is a handful of poems excerpted from “Autobiography,” the third in my “smaller” trilogy–the book of smaller (2022) [see my short essay on such here] and the book of sentences (2025) [see my short essay on such here]–the full-length of which is forthcoming with University of Calgary Press at some point. The selected is taken from my 1990s-era published work, as selected by New Jersey poet and editor Jordan Davis, who also plans to release two more volumes of my work over the next year or two? Gadzooks!

rob mclennan, two new chapbooks and a book-length essay

This article “Everybody is a Math Person . . .” by writer and teacher Larry Ferlazzo explores the nature of math anxiety and also the meanings of the terms:  “math person” and “poetry person.”  

Ferlazzo offers these views:  Many students say:  “I’m not good at math.” A statement made by one student that turns into a ripple effect: “Math is so hard.” “My parents aren’t good at math, and neither am I.” “I just don’t have a math brain.”  

He goes on to say that as a math teacher, he has “found it essential for students to be able to experience a sense of wonder, happiness, excitement, anticipation, puzzlement, and relaxation.”  He has found that poems can open a door to thinking positively about math.

JoAnne Growney, Is each of us a MATH PERSON?

I confidently submitted it to a competition I really wanted to win. I did not win. I was very, very disappointed.

It took two years to go back to the poem. Failing to place when I’ve been brave enough to enter something always hurts, no matter how philosophical I am. Something about this poem kept drawing me back. Esteemed poetry tutors often describe an early draft as “having legs” and Barn Owl was one of those drafts.

This next version is back to conventional form. The prose poem felt a contrived, clumsy and distracting. I’ve cut a lot of lines and words that distract too

“the first time I roll one two towels into a sausage shape to go either side of your legs”

became

“the first time I rolled one, two towels
tight as I could, to support, comfort
the uncomfortable”

You may agree that the word “sausage” is always likely to be a distraction in a poem about death.

Kathryn Anna Marshall, Evolution of a poem

Searching for “Tim Love” (author) on Goodreads, these appeared on the first page of results –

• The Book That Gets Better With Age: Observations Through the Looking Glass of Aging by Tim Love
• Tim Love on the Lonesome Dove Trail by Tim Love
• The Medium is the Mirror: The Reformation of Truth Reshaping Our Relationships, Politics, and Sacred Beliefs by Tim Love et al
• Discovering Truth: How to Navigate between Fact & Fiction in an Overwhelming Social Media World by Tim Love et al
• I love Tim: Notebook / Journal / Diary – 6 x 9 inches (15,24 x 22,86 cm), 150 pages. For everyone who’s in love with Tim by I Love Tim Publishing
• Urbanism Starter Kit by Tim Love

Needless to say, I wrote none of them. I wouldn’t mind reading some of them though. My By All Means is there too. 1 review. 1 rating.

Tim Love, Tim Love on Goodreads

you love estate sales. they overwhelm me.
so much emotion. the frenzy of the visitors
& the ghosts of an emptying house.
i try to imagine the place before
its final dissection. this one feels special
because a gay couple lived here.
their queerness sewn into the bookshelves
& the collections of paintings. fish
& men & trees & birds. strings of shells.
a little bin beneath the bed with stage makeup.
feather headpieces. did he do drag? just liked
to entertain? in the basement a leak soaks
the floor. a woman shoulders past me
to get a look at a pile of frames.

Robin Gow, 8/5

Is having your own dedicated writing space a necessity for you, or a luxury? Is it even an accessible possibility?

In my comment on Nic’s post yesterday I named the three places I most commonly write: the dining room of my shared house when my housemates haven’t got the projector on (or aren’t having a conversation), my bedroom floor (no judgement please), and my partner’s sofa. I’d like to add to this little list: not so often anymore but sometimes a brunch cafe or pub (with headphones/earplugs ofc), the Manchester Poetry Library, and when I’m visiting my Mum – her kitchen table.

I’m a writer of convenience. While part of me is drawn to the icon that is a writing desk of my own, it’s also unrealistic for my situation. Instead everything I have and use is portable: a small laptop, a single A4 notebook, a button up A4 pouch when needed, pens in the pockets of all my bags, a selected couple books of poetry to take to whatever writing station I’m using that day.

This does (as I said to Nic) help to keep the ‘stuff’ to a minimum at least, but as I reflect on it I think I also genuinely enjoy the different spaces, sights, and sensations offered by different environments, the versatility of knowing I can write (almost) anywhere, and sometimes just the novelty of being in a new space (or perhaps it just satisfies my ADHD’s restlessness).

Rachael Hill, What’s your space?

In the film Mughal-e-Azam, Emperor Akbar entombs Anarkali, the woman his son loves. Set to inherit the throne of Hindustan, the prince must not fall in love with a mere courtesan, so beneath his social standing. The romance must end, one way or another. And so she is ordered to be entombed alive inside the palace walls. This scene played in my mind today when a woman covered my entire face with a sheet of gauze before applying cement-like clay on it, covering even my eyes, my lips, and so it felt like drowning, like death. It was quite surreal, feeling this heaviness weigh down my face, layer by layer by layer. All blackness, then a tiny spot of blue, the poetry of Anne Carson, the men that should be kissed, the music of Erik Satie, the women and their books, a forest of text, a field made of manuscripts, then blankness, until I feel like I cannot breathe anymore, that this, indeed, is the end. And so this is how I find out that a Korean glass skin facial recreates well the experience of being the forbidden lover of a prince.

Saudamini Deo, What do Mughal-e-Azam and Korean facials have in common?

From the next carriage, the sudden sound of a man wailing a raw despair.
The train stops at a platform, a door slams, slams again, and I see
the police officers haul him along, his feet dragging, his face contorted.

We pass a city of tents, someone receiving CPR on the floor of a shop,
a man in robes descending a long flight of stone steps, a child firing
a water pistol, people following a woman with a pink umbrella.

Bob Mee, RANDOMLY, AND SO…

It was almost midnight when we pulled into our driveway, my arm in a sling, Oxy in hand. I had an appointment the next day with one of our authors, Luke Goebel, who has written about the perils of the Oxy epidemic. I pictured myself saying, Hey Luke, I’m on Oxy right now, and him saying, What?

It’s been surreal. The pain, the pills, the loss of mobility.

My dear friend, Nicelle, came by to help me get a bath and make sure I was looking out the windows. Today, we went to Kaiser. They took more X-rays. Gave me a soft splint brace. Showed me the long fracture.

Are you still working? the Physician Assistant asked. Can you rest this month? I stared at him like a deer stares at a train—wildly wondering why the lights of it keep coming and coming.

He lives in another country. In another country, one takes a month off. One rests. Like God on the seventh day.

I had thought well, maybe we will still go camping! But no, not even close.

The pie will have to wait; we will hold onto it. I do not often take care of myself. But right now, it seems necessary. I will keep working, but I will do micro bits of self care as well.

I may surprise myself and break out like the morning. I always like to think that anything could happen.

And then, on August 6^th, something exciting did happen. My memoir, Little Soldiers, debuted in People Magazine, alongside a beautiful quote from Sarah Jessica Parker: “Kate reconstructs her past with breathtaking lyricism and heartfelt vulnerability. These pages sing with humor even in the darkest of circumstances. Little Soldiers is a glorious reclamation of the past and a triumphant depiction of one woman’s journey to freedom.”

I thought, Sarah! You see this book, this story! And crippled, tangled, smashed by pain, I felt that leaping moment of yes, of gratitude, to my agent Jeff Kleinman who carried this book forward, to Sarah Ried at Zando who did an ungodly amount of editing, and to Sarah Jessica Parker for loving books and for falling in love with this one.

Kate Gale, Soul-Knitting Through the Long Night

The Venerable Bede — who was canonized long ago and is now Saint Bede, but whom everybody remembers as The Venerable — reports, in his book De Temporum Ratione (“On the Reckoning of Time”) that the ancient Angle-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” because, well, there are a lot of them at that time. It’s still true, but there are some we’re glad to have around. My current crop of milkweed is sparse, but I do see some butterfly activity, so I await caterpillars. And I remember this poem, which must be ten years old now.

Butterfly Unit

Old equivalents:
insect metamorphosis
and the grade-school class

blundering with me
through a weed-choked patch along
railroad rights-of-way,

plucking milkweed plants. […]

Maryann Corbett, The month of weeds

The weekend included our second visit to a yarn show in Newcastle. It is lovely to return to a familiar setting, and to talk with returning customers as well as to meet new people. If you’ve followed this blog for a while you will know I love the conversations that arrive from being in such a setting, and there were many during the days we were there. Here’s a comment I am delighted to set down because it was an instant response that came about after I had read a poem out loud  –  who’d have thought such things could happen just like that in the yarn world – “It’s like a real one. It’s deep.” That’s a great critique of a poem heard for the first time, and it made my heart sing.

Here’s to conversations, impromptu poetry reading, growing good things and to enjoying fruits when they are in season.

Sue Finch, LOGANBERRIES

We go — the last tram rings its bell —
Along the blinding boulevard.
Yesterday lies where it fell.
Tomorrow’s sunning in the yard.
Poplars waver in the dust.
Summers fly where summers must.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: On Vacation

This week: cotton grass and bracken, craquelure and rust, language plugged into the quantum field, the foraminifera, and much more. Enjoy.

Driving from Manchester to Leicester all the grass in all the fields I pass is dead and brown. Are you not terrified? Do you not wake in the night dripping with dread? Does your heart not burn with grief?

When I saw my friend who I had not seen for many months I was reminded how everything is and isn’t. In the shape of his face I saw was, is, and will be. All our shared memories were in a jar of honey I held in my hands; I considered dipping my fingertip into it but the lid was screwed tightly on.

I always see the same girl in the mirror. Even when I squint, or peer surreptitiously from the corner of my eye. Even when I try my hardest to be quick, unexpected, to catch her off guard, she is there waiting for me with the same hair and nose and eyes and cheeks and chin always so familiar and always so deeply surprising.

At the open mic I held my contributor copy in my hand, read my own words and felt something with no name. Perhaps at that moment some of my atoms had chosen to switch places, or some of my cells ate up some of their neighbours. Perhaps the bird migrating endlessly through my body paused for a short while to wait out a bad weather front, or to enjoy a dappled morning.

Rachael Hill, Some Field Observations

Sitting on a beach in Normandy earlier this month, I admired the seagulls riding various plumes of wind. It was too windy and cold to swim, which left me with words and thoughts and the realization (once again) that the waves of science are jammed by the presence of angels and metaphysical Others. 

I say “once again” because I touched on this in a poem titled “The First Gust of Special Relativity is Weightlessness” (published in My Heresies). Susanna Lang was right: the poet could not stop seeing what the scientist might have seen when imagining the theory of gravity. 

Alina Stefanescu, The metaphysics of others in metaphysical Others.

Last weekend I went on a writers’ retreat with some friends [from] my writing group. Well, writers’ retreat is a loose label. We went to a summer cottage in the Turku archipelago, in the west of Finland. This was our fourth year of having a Helsinki Writers Group retreat since Covid, though we missed the last two years, I think, due to low numbers. It’s hard to organise 6 or more people to do anything together, but totally worth it when we manage. 

We did a few writing things, had writing related talks and did writing prompts. I did a lot of journaling, but mostly we just hung out and did Finnish summer cottage things: picked berries and mushrooms, walked in the woods, sauna’d and jumped in the sea, drank a bit, played some games and ate a lot of food. All in all, a lovely relaxing weekend, except for the long drive. 

One of the presentations from a lovely writer that works in IT was on AI witch hunts for writers: how to recognise AI writing (most of which they have already found ways around) and avoid our writing being mistaken for AI. How is this even a problem?! 

Gerry Stewart, Do I Continue to Feed the Beast?

When I’m told, “Listen to what your body tells you,” I want to respond, “My body tells me never to talk to another human, to stay in the house on my own and smoke, it tells me to hurt myself.” If I listened to my body, I would not be alive. I would certainly not write, or teach, or speak in front of crowds. I would not have conceived and given birth, I would not have known love. My life has been a long exercise in ignoring my body.

Rather, I think, I need a conversation with my body. One in which I listen to its fears and desires, and respond thoughtfully. Today was that day. On the summit of Black Hill, Niamh and I decided that a night’s rough camping at Standedge was not for us, and we booked a room at the Diggle Hotel.

And we walked with Ken and Ali through the day. There was laughter, and we paddled our hot feet in a stream. There was a lizard, and meadow pipits, and skylarks, and a single buzzard. There was cotton grass, and bracken, and bilberries growing fat. Today was a kind day. Purple moors stretched in waves, and the tower blocks of Manchester shimmered on the horizon.

Clare Shaw, Walking the Pennine Way: Day Two

This dead facsimile of person.
This paper doll traveling
hand over hand
as though
descending through hell on a rope
and touching down in this dead room.

This thoroughly dead house.
Even the books lining the shelves
are empty of silverfish,
empty of dust motes,
there is no more light.

Rebecca Cook, The Pain that Writes Poems on the Body

A boring poem no one will want to read is one of those rare ones that come unbidden, in a sudden, overpowering flash, a poem you write as though possessed, that knows itself well and wills itself out on the page and into the world so strongly that you must instantly do its bidding.

Indeed, when I wrote it I felt I was entirely under its influence, as though it were a living entity taking control of my brain and of my dominant hand. I vividly remember when I wrote this poem and what brought it on: one of my dear friends messaged me, on a day seemingly like any other, to let me know that their parent had just passed away. Their parent was living in one country, my friend in another, and I in yet another country. It’s at times like these that the heaviest consequences of migration hit: home becomes fragmented, pieces of ourselves falling forever out of reach in the places we have left behind, or among the people we love whom we couldn’t transplant with us.

I did not know how to reply to my friend’s message. What were they truly feeling in that moment, what did they need, and what could I even have offered from a distance? This brought on a deluge of complicated memories and emotions: being away from my family at key moments with only a smartphone screen to preserve our fragile bond, missed celebrations and funerals, the graves of people I loved that I could now only pay homage to in my thoughts, and the quiet support of chosen family found far away from my place of birth. I also vividly recalled my high-school literature teacher who taught my classmates and I not just how to become ‘professional readers’, like he used to say, but also about the shiftier grounds of power and authority, and how art holds a mirror up to society, often unflatteringly in a harsh light, revealing all its bumps, scars, and pus-filled pustules. That teacher, by the way, died last year. Another funeral I was unable to attend.

In any case, the poem that came to me was, inevitably, a poem about all the boring things – loss, complicated grief, loving people and missing them, the inability to explain the need to leave, lose oneself, and remain lost. All the boring, monotonous things in life are poetry, I remember thinking when I’d finished writing ‘A boring poem…’. A writer’s job is to bring out the deep, complicated emotions enmeshed with the unremarkable; to be brave enough to write, that is, ‘ordinary poems, about unremarkable things.’

Drop-in by Maria Cohut (Nigel Kent)

I’m still in the process of creating the poem.  I used the verb “wrestling,” but this morning’s writing hasn’t been a struggle.  I started the poem not knowing where it would end, which is not how I always write.  In fact, I’m more likely to think and think and think about a poem idea and figure it all out–for some poems, this process results in writing out a finished poem with few surprises, and for some poems, I figure out that it’s not worth the effort of typing it into the computer.

I like the potential for surprise that comes from starting before I figure it all out.  Here are the lines that surprised me this morning:

Jesus knows that first you must
cast out the demons of ungrounded
wires and faulty connections.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Car Inspections and Jesus Rewiring a Fixer-Upper

As some of you may recall, last fall I had the great pleasure of traveling to Japan with my husband and son. The highlight was a six-day walking tour tracing part of the route of 17th century haiku poet Bashō.

I’m thrilled that a major haiku journal has published a haiku sequence inspired by the trip. When my husband Paul saw the piece, laid out over two pages, he joked, “You got the centerfold in Modern Haiku!” I’m happy to share it here, with thanks to editor Paul Miller. […]

three wayfarers
we catch up to Bashō
by bullet train

Narrow Road
everyone driving
on the wrong side

dancing maples
we clap and clap
for bears

Annette Makino, Catching up to Bashō

While driving back from Norfolk last weekend, I idly mused on the idea of poets having roadies. Either to come in and set up our writing desks, fountain pens in racks like guitars back stage..A different pen being brought out to us depending on what poem we’re working on. Maybe free writing is the soundcheck. Maybe I should just stop thinking.

Writing poems is like picking a reel of sellotape. It’s either really easy, or it takes forever to get into it.

Mat Riches, Marvellous: A Page of Bertron

a summer’s car ride, top down,
yelling to the wind, to the night,
to the swollen creek, to the war,
to the empty bed and plate,
to a song of crickets and dogs
barking, to something unseen
in the woods moving, to
the passing train’s whistle,
to the hush in this room,
to eyes seeing what shouldn’t
be seen, to whispers of sleep
that ask and tell, to hands
not willing to stop

Sam Rasnake, New Poem, “From the Basement Stacks: 4”

My week has included some lovely opportunities to send and write anniversary poems. I was very proud to have set aside time to write one for L and O, but had counted too many years so they received a ‘tin’ poem when it should have been pottery. The kettle then went on, and I sharpened my brain to compose the correct kind of poem for their ninth anniversary instead. Pleasingly I managed it just in time. The week also included thirty years of marriage for R and S. I didn’t know until I saw a post on social media, but it felt serendipitous because I had been wanting to write a pearl anniversary poem for a while. I thoroughly enjoyed having the right inspiration to be creative right there and then, and I was delighted when the poem was well-received. It was also the first poem written entirely at my newly restored writing desk. There’s something special about writing in a dedicated space, and although I like the portability of my laptop and the joy of having a notes app on my phone and a good range of notebooks that mean that I can take my writing anywhere, I also love the ritual of desk writing. So all in all it’s been a lovely week of gifting words and of extending the number of poems I have created to celebrate the symbolism of different anniversaries.

Sue Finch, IT’S TIN, IT’S POTTERY, IT’S PEARL

A video setting of Rilke’s poem “Moving Forward” as well as my “Song” (from Moon Baboon Canoe) that I created for an aerial dance performance some time ago. Rilke’s poem was translated by Robert Bly who I once took a class with and he told me—I was 16—that I had a beautiful face. He told me this in the context of consoling a friend who was weeping during the workshop where we had to write about a rock as if it were our father.

Gary Barwin, Moving Forward on Fishes

Hubble site:
impatiently waiting
for a galaxy to load

Tom Clausen, dainty

Dedicating each poem to a poet who has “inspired, surprised, lifted, comforted, and taught [her] how to be a better poet,” [Ellen] Rowland includes in the world she traverses some of the “ancestors” of all the poets who have come after them: Rainer Maria Rilke, for example, Harlem Renaissance poet Angelina Weld Grimke, and T.S. Eliot. Some — William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Mahmoud Darwish — have passed from this world but remain well-known and widely studied for their contributions as poets. Others, such as Christian Wiman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, Jane Hirshfield, Ellen Bass, Ted Kooser, Ross Gay, Donna Hilbert, and Linda Hogan, are among the contemporary names that surface frequently online, among prize winners and poets laureate, and in the pages of many literary journals.

Looking at those names again, you have to acknowledge being in the presence of a discriminating, curious, and avid reader and learner. Moreover, read the poems and you’ll hear how well Rowland knows the voices and has studied the styles of all these poets, their subjects, especially the natural world, and how they use them, the space they occupy in our literary canon and beyond. Indeed, what is clear is that Rowland has cultivated a lifetime of relationships with each, living and not; she could even be said to be these poets’ literary ambassador, her interests and influences global in reach and depth.

Maureen Doallas, Ellen Rowland’s ‘In Search of Lost Birds’

Emotional Dance Music [by Miles Bradley] is a masterclass in paying attention to those subtle shifts in mood that ripple between people, like the moment of shoals of fish, or starling murmurations. The poems are concerned, primarily, with interiority, but the narrator wrongfoots us by switching between interior and exterior action. It is as if we are watching the director’s cut of a movie we may have seen before, layering previously deleted scenes, outtakes, alternate endings onto our former understanding of what the whole thing was about.

Miles writes with the kind of disarming emotional honesty coupled with a simultaneous wry distancing that I think is common of the Tumblr generation. We are in the world of house parties, 5am texts, messy comedowns and conversations in bathtubs. I confess I’ve always found house parties quite stressful (I suspect I’m fundamentally too upright to ever truly ‘let go’ and be in the moment), so there’s something slightly anthropological about seeing them through the eyes of an evident house party veteran. […]

The whole Definitive Publicly Voted Peer Reviewed Expert Assessed Ranking of Locations to Have Night Defining Year Wrecking Life Changing Conversations at House Parties (to give the full title) sequence feels like the beating heart of the collection. What they do really well is explore, through the microcosm of the house party, the expectations we place on external events and on other people, to provide us with excitement, solace, a feeling of belonging.

Victoria Spires, Emotional Dance Music

Reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), in order, one after another, as I have been doing lately, it’s easier than you might think — though it feels blasphemous — to begin to ask yourself why, exactly, these poems needed to exist. What urgency, precisely, is driving them? Aside from the inescapable fact of their technical achievement, the perfect working out of lines of English in iambic pentameter and the structural organization of four quatrains and a couplet — aside from the fact that they’re so paradigmatic that this entire variation on the sonnet form, first devised by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517–1547), bears not Surrey’s name but Shakespeare’s, as another word for English — what is it about these sonnets that makes them that worth reading, in order, one after another?

Why, when the poet has written one sonnet about the responsibility of a beautiful young man to procreate and thus perpetuate his beauty, does he need sixteen more to hammer home the same idea? And after seventeen sonnets on that specific theme, why — far from having exhausted it, apparently — does he continue developing the same theme, proposing verse as another mode by which beauty may be perpetuated, reminding the same object of affection of the encroachment of time that renders some means of perpetuation desirable, bemoaning the waste of said fleeting time spent apart, and so on? Looked at this way, the first 126, at least, of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets might be described as about the same thing (admittedly in a relational arc) over and over. Why?

To look at the sonnets this way, as Helen Vendler has suggested, is to regard them as — to appropriate and repurpose Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase — “all dead paper.” It’s to read them as nothing but a collective artifact of words, all reducible to the same basic, eventually predictable message, delivered in an echo chamber. But this is not at all what they are. Just as Barrett Browning’s letters seem, to her hand, “alive and quivering” with all they wish to communicate, so these sonnets, too, are “alive” in some ineffable way that becomes apparent the longer we live with them.

And we live best with them not as we live with inanimate objets d’art, but as our closest way of living with the mind of a person, who more than four hundred years ago took up his pen to write to another person: not simply to declaim to that person, in a series of soliloquies, but to converse with him. Human beings, after all, are made to engage with each other. The urgency that drives these sonnets is, on its deepest level, the urgency of the desire for connectio — even when connection looks like argument.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sonnet 116

[T]he most striking thing here is the musical stave on the right hand side. Unfortunately, I know very little about early modern music and its notation so I can’t attempt to play the tune. But, fascinatingly, it does appear to be indicating a tune for the poem itself: the words beneath the stave are the first two lines of the poem.

Epodes 1 is written in iambic distichs: an iambic trimeter followed by an iambic dimeter. This couplet then repeats throughout, so a tune for the first two lines would be enough for the whole poem. The first ten epodes are all in this metre, so in theory the same tune could work for them all, but there is another piece of musical notation at the top of Epodes 3, as you can see below on the right hand side. This is shorter and it looks to me — though I am the opposite of an expert on this — as if it corresponds only to the trimeter, not to the trimeter and the dimeter.

It is relatively common to find neumes (medieval musical notation) alongside the text of Horace in medieval manuscripts, especially in France and Germany, although my understanding is that these are usually odes rather than epodes. Although I have quite often seen scraps of music in early modern English books and manuscripts, I have never seen them attached to the text of Horace in this way, which perhaps suggests that the tradition of singing Horace’s Latin — especially at school — was more of a French and German tradition. It would be really fascinating to know whether the tunes noted here are recognisable, and whether they are anything like the ones recorded in medieval manuscripts.

Victoria Moul, Can you sing the Epodes?

I haven’t had much time for reading lately. Poems and stories I’ve read in the past pop into my head a lot though. Mallarmé’s ‘Brise marine’ is one of those. I find most of his work incomprehensible but that’s a poem I enjoyed as a boy and still do now. It’s obviously very much under the influence of Baudelaire’s dream voyages but gives a completely different sensation to them and I thought I’d try to say something about the difference. […]

Simply murmuring the words aloud gives me an intense, almost sensuous pleasure in the formation of their sounds, both on a phonetic level and in the cadence of the phrases (though of course different readers do pitch these phrases differently). Moreover, though the broad Baudelairean influence is obvious, what’s striking is how original line after line, image after image, statement after statement is in the way it encapsulates the ideas and sensations it expresses.  This is what gives them such imaginative bite. With what stunning sweep ‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres’ brings together physical and intellectual malaise to suggest a comprehensive jadedness with what the speaker’s actual life offers. The very hyperbole of ‘tous les livres’ suggests an exacerbating state of nervous exhaustion. Almost every statement seems to me to realise its idea with almost equal precision and penetrating power. What’s really striking, though, is that although the power of these lines depends on the way they suggest ideas through concrete images, these images are so generalised as to hover on the edge of abstraction. Nothing makes us imagine the steamer, the anchor, the alien clime, the waving handkerchiefs, the storm, the fertile islands with any particularity. This is a strength of a very different kind to what we find in Baudelaire’s poems of southern and eastern voyaging. In them there’s a sensual, almost carnal physicality to the imagery[.]

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s physicality vs Mallarmé’s abstraction

[Graeme] Richardson […] is a warts-and-all poet whose output gets down and dirty with the dark side of life (and death) as well as the light(er). In poems covering his years an Anglican priest, notably in his native Notts., and in others of his childhood and adolescence, he is refreshingly frank and unflinching. Take the octet of his sonnet-of-sorts, ‘Bearings’:

One poor dear – 84, in the hospice,
just a few picked chicken-bones
under the sheets, fists
bulbs of dried garlic,
and a head of dandelion fluff
almost blown –
before she finally gave up
cried out all night for her Mum.

As much as the precision of the three uncompromising comparisons, the cumulative impact of which served to remind me of my mother’s last days, I like that it took me a couple of readings to grasp the syntax. I like the line-endings too – six end with a noun end all of them end with words which are significant in conveying the overall portrait of the elderly woman: here is a poet who knows how to arrange his sentences across and down the page. What should we make of the opening, ‘One poor dear’? Is it condescending, demeaning and/or sexist? Yes, to a degree, I think, but it’s the sort of language which many of us would use. The unnecessary capitalisation of the first em of ‘Mum’ possibly serves to emphasise the woman’s reduced and infantilised state. It’s unsparing writing, and for that reason will be read as either brave or beyond the pale, depending on your viewpoint.

The poem on the facing page, ‘In Holywell Cemetery’, is, for my money, the finest in the book; a beautiful lyric of five ABAB-rhymed quatrains. Here’s the opening stanza:

Swirling iron, craquelure and rust,
shuddering with slowly crawling cars,
Earth absorbs the poison with the dust;
graves await an amaranthine grass.

The trochaic meter, reminiscent of Auden, well suits a poem about a Victorian Oxford cemetery. Those two words ‘craquelure’ (the cracks in a painting) and ‘amaranthine’ (of, or like, plants in the amaranth family) are showy indicators, as clear and bold as the meter, of Richardson’s ability to write in a high, traditional register. The poem isn’t moving solely because of these facets, but they augment the poet’s intention to write a poem with an ambition to say something beyond the superficiality of its concrete subject-matter. The full poem can be read here, in Bad Lilies (edited by Neilson and his wife Kathryn Gray) where it was first published – as you’ll see, it unfolds and circles back quite beautifully. While I knew who Kenneth Grahame and Walter Pater were, I had to look up (Charles Buller) Heberden, a vice-chancellor of Oxford.

While that might sound a bit fusty, crusty and, well, patriarchal, I can assure you that Dirt Rich comprises an array of forms, both classical and contemporary, and subject-matter. It was quite bizarrely overlooked for the Forward Prize longlists for both first and best collection, let alone the shortlists, at the expense of some collections which I’ve read and found much less rewarding. I know that prizes aren’t important, that lists are subjective and, worst of all, that judges appear not to recuse themselves from evaluating collections published by their own publisher and instead seem merrily oblivious to how looks; however, it doesn’t help the poetry landscape of the UK if books as good as Richardson’s don’t get a look-in. Maybe he’s upset too many people with his reviews in the TLS and the Sunday Times – not that I’ve ever read the latter, but I gather that he can be quite trenchant.

Matthew Paul, Some of my July reading

A long single-sentence prose poem pokes fun at the idea this collection could in any way be taken too seriously, an eagerness for the poet to show a lack of pretension. The credits point to “a book that he’d found under a seat, left there by a troubled young woman who had taken it from an ex-lover in an act of petty vengeance, an ex-lover who had never actually read it, having swapped it for another book with a friend who had purchased it directly from the author, who in turn had based the book, their one and only novel, on a stage play that they saw in the back room of a tavern on the eve of its demolition, a play written by a committee of five revolutionary poets, each of whom claimed that their individual contributions were entirely original when, in actual fact, they were variously based on a repressed memory, a half-forgotten nightmare, a drunken post-coital conversation, a feverish hallucination and a meeting with what may or may not have been their future selves.” The inter-connectedness of all things and how inspiration can be thought to be original but is drawn from past encounters, half-remembered ideas and individual interpretation.

[Stefan] Mohamed merges poetry and storytelling to create a fragmentary narrative, influenced by cinematic imagery and sprinkled with moments of cynical humour.

Emma Lee, “The Revelation Tapes” Stefan Mohamed (Broken Sleep Books) – book review

Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her debut poetry collection, Descântec For My Split Tongue, is published by Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books. Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com. […]

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

These days, it’s so easy not to start a project—I even paused in the middle of writing this sentence to breastfeed—that beginning at all feels miraculous! Once I’ve arrived at the page, I try to protect that momentum and return to it daily, even if only for fifteen minutes. I have so many books asking to be written: children’s books, hybrid books of collage, poetry, and essay, books on language learning, and at least a dozen collaborative projects with friends. My first drafts often come quickly, but I’ve found that I do my best work when there’s some form of sharing. I was most prolific when I brought a new poem each week to my writing coach, Tara Skurtu, or to the Multilingual Art Lab of The Polyglot, where the drafts could be shaped and sharpened in conversation. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m interested in how languages are learned, lost, silenced, reclaimed, and revitalized. I wrote Descântec For My Split Tongue as an incantation to reclaim Romanian, my mother tongue, after years of feeling it slip away. At the same time, I was pursuing a PhD in language education, asking what can be done to creatively support youth heritage language maintenance in our communities. My research drew on poetic inquiry, community arts-based research, multiliteracies, and sociocultural theory (if you’re interested, you can download the dissertation for free here!). I enjoyed exploring how bilingual poetry, as well as other artistic modes like self-portraiture, protest art, illustration, photography, video, animation, and painting, can help us sustain our languages and ways of knowing that are at risk of being lost. I brought a lot of what I learned to my first collection of poems.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

“From the moment you try to impose a path on a poet, you pave the way for dictatorships,” Raúl Zurita recently said in an interview. I don’t have a prescriptive role for a writer, but a task—to pay close attention, especially to the things that are disappearing, ignored, forgotten, or silenced. To notice connections that others might miss and make them visible (for example, the connection between preserving our planet’s biological diversity and linguistic diversity). In a world of speed, distraction, neverending atrocities—a single poem can slow us down. A poem in another language, or in translation, can slow us down, even more. It’s incredible what we learn when we slow down and pay attention.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adriana Oniță

Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama
First off, don’t read this one. I listen to this poet host Poetry Unbound (a podcast of poems by various poets), so I was curious what his own work was like. Like most poetry collections, this one is broken up into sections. I liked the Kitchen Hymns sections (there are two), and the “Do you believe in God?” section (every poem in that section had that question as the title, but were wildly different poems – I am fascinated by that idea, using the same title for many poems, like an interrogation or recurring question in one’s life with many different responses), but the rest of the book was meh.

I guess I should define my use of “meh” – most of the book is this back and forth between Jesus and Persephone in a garden after leaving hell. The writing is flat, lacking imagery, and honestly kind of boring. But also, from my perspective as a Christian, I don’t like writing that adds words or actions to Jesus; I feel that it is disrespectful (Prov. 30:5-6, and there are other verses to support this view, if you want more on why I feel this way). So overall I can’t really recommend this book, though there are individual poems of his I liked.

Renee Emerson, The tailor shop at the intersection (and other delights)

‘If you don’t agree with me,’ Richard Hugo tells us in Chapter 1 of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, ‘don’t listen. Think about something else.’

I like this as an opening gambit. I’m terrible at being told what to do, generally. Ask my parents. But in the poetry world I quite like a bit of advice. I can’t pretend I always act on it, or take it with good grace (sorry), but I do listen, and I keep it in case I want it later. Very often I do. […]

What I really like about Hugo is his wanton disregard for standard writing advice. He’s refreshing to read. The ‘Triggering Town’ of the title refers to one of his central arguments – that the carved-in-stone received wisdom that is write what you know is nonsense. I KNOW, RIGHT? I can hear you gasping from here. But as he says,

If you feel pressure to say what you know others want to hear and don’t have enough devil in you to surprise them, shut up.

Basically, Hugo tells us, the whole point of a poem has to be the language, the joy and sound of the words, and in order for that to happen we have to reach beyond the known – our imagination must ‘free itself to seek the unknown’. Towns we know, metaphorically speaking, are too bogged down with our memories and associations. We can’t find anything new. We worry about doing the truth justice.

The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.

So if you create a new place to put a poem in, as long as you can ‘take emotional possession’ of it, the poem can be freed from the ‘triggering subject’. Then it’s just about the words.

The words should not serve the concept. The concept should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts.

Ooh, it’s a seductive idea. As a lifelong style-over-content advocate, I have definitely flirted with it, but as someone who also writes incessantly about what I know, something has (so far) stopped me falling for it hook, line and sinker. That’s OK. I don’t have to. He told me that in Chapter 1. I still love the essay. I love that he wrote it, because it gives us a way to think differently about what we’re doing.

Nia Broomhall, Week 20: The Triggering Town

I’m happy to release these two new chaps together because they both stake out a territory that is (for me) a breath of fresh air after a few years of darker, doom-laden poems. Also, I’ve wanted to make booklets that were interesting as self-contained worlds, not just collections of poems, and I think I’ve (nearly?) achieved that here. I’ll let the Ko-Fi page give you most of the deets, but let me add a couple notes here.

The Other Century is an ambiguous fictional narrative that uses both original and found or appropriated texts, tho they’re heavily altered and woven into the subliminal storyline. I shared one of the collection’s more elaborate poems on here last winter, and if you like that, you will like this collection. Several historical figures live in these poems too: Musidora, Fritz Lang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kristen Stewart. […]

As for Rat Heart Nebula, I shared a few pieces from it not long ago. It can’t really be summed up, but rest assured: it will eat your face. No narrative, no logic, no persona—nothing but language plugged into the quantum field. Plus, it features an original collage that weaves in some of the text […]

R.M. Haines, Two New Chapbooks, A New Storefront, and More

A reported story in The Open Notebook discusses writing about disability with six different writers. Kate Horowitz, the primary author, writes, “To write about a body is to expose it.” I would also add “the brain” as well. You could argue that writing in itself is exposure—think of the many memoirs that have probably gotten their writers in trouble that aren’t about disability. But there is an extra weight to writing about your disability in a way that is true to you while also avoiding the stigma that keeps you down more than your disability itself.

The piece also highlights the experience of journalist Keah Brown, who writes about her conditions out of necessity and for the pursuit of accurate representation. For so long, I felt that I was the only one who felt this way. After exploring online communities, I knew I wasn’t.

I pursued my narrative as an autobiographical one. After all, Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Recall earlier how panic attacks and agoraphobia are difficult to accurately describe. You’ll notice in a lot of media that uses agoraphobia in a sensational manner mostly focuses on the “I must stay in the house,” thinking and less of the physical sensations that accompany it. Or it is from another character that is observing the agoraphobic person instead, their annoyance and frustration with them.

I instead started by looking at the photographs directly. If I were in the photo, what would I be thinking about? Would I be panicking or trying to find coping skills? I then untangled my thoughts and wove them into lines, pursued enjambment to mimic the feeling of catching myself mid-panic attack and refocusing. I plucked out precise words from generative sessions and worked until they painted the “right” feeling.

I also focused on the reality of how difficult it is to heal from agoraphobia like this when women and femmes are presented with real dangers of being in the outside world. There is a poem I included of a police officer in an unmarked car following me at night. There is no clean way to separate “there is nothing to fear about the outside world” and the inherent misogyny and violence against women anywhere. In any case of agoraphobia, there is no “just get over it.” There are many layers to deconstruct and trust to rebuild with the world around you.

Finally, after several years and many distractions from a full-time job and other writing assignments in between, I managed to get Agora into the world.

When presenting this book and its backstory at a recent event, a woman raised her voice, smiled with the smile you would give a baby at a restaurant and said, “I’m so proud of you! Look at you! How far you’ve come! In a room full of people! Yay!”

I stayed graceful, smiling and thanking her, despite it being an infantilizing experience. Maybe if she bought a copy, she would have known better. But until then, I have no choice but to keep writing and representing the way my disability looks to me.

Exploring Disability Through Poetry – guest post by Gretchen Gales (Trish Hopkinson)

The poem’s title asks “what do we do when the old monsters die” but the rest of the poem asks “what about before they die but after we’re beyond their reach?” The poem supposes a monster who is facing death and is trying to get right with god.

what do we do when our wishes come true and their poor hearts or lungs or livers fail and they say they’ve found Jesus and cry out Forgive us Forgive us Forgive us (we’re told) but we still won’t answer our phones or open their mail? (Is it true we’re cruel and cold?)

I really like the choice of “us” versus “me” in that line because it seems like it’s never just one. It would be nice for it to be just one, I think. But the real power is in the plea from the monster begging forgiveness and apparently claiming the speaker is cruel and cold for not being willing to engage.

This isn’t a scenario I’ll ever get to deal with. Fortunately, my abuse ended not terribly long after it started. One of my aunts moved in with us for a while and took over the child care duties, and then we moved to Louisiana, far away from Karen. I don’t know if she’s still alive or if she ever thought twice about that time. It’s taken a lot of work for me but I don’t even try to imagine it anymore. I’ve accepted that it’s unknowable. But I can say that in some alternate universe where Karen shows up 50+ years later and demands forgiveness out of the blue that it’s not cruel to deny that. Even when a person who has harmed you has done real work to atone and change, you don’t owe them forgiveness.

But that’s rarely how it happens, isn’t it?

The second section of Rathburn’s poem restates the opening question but moves it back in time from “when the old monsters die” to “when the monsters grow thin / their eyes sunken in, and we cannot stand to join the rest, to pat the jaundiced hands?” and also starts to poke at the social pressure that we can get from, for instance, extended family or members of a community, to let grievances go when it’s clear that the monster is about to die or at least has lost some of the ability they once had to cause direct harm. The next lines talk of the monster being “stripped / of their claws and fangs and look, in the end / like ordinary old women and men” and I think that impulse is understandable, especially for someone who maybe wasn’t the direct recipient of harm, who only heard stories or suspected but never really knew.

Brian Spears, “What Do We Do When the Old Monsters Die” by Chelsea Rathburn

One of the things I love about Red Hen Press, one of many, is that with a long wait from acceptance to publication, it allows me to craft a stronger book. Yes, the title and the themes of the book will remain the same. The size of the book won’t shift much either. However, with Blue Atlas, I traded out at least 1/3 of the book for newer, stronger work. I know that the book I submitted to Red Hen and the book they published were quite different. I need to also mention that Red Hen Press, which is located in Los Angeles, dealt with floods, closed grant options (NEA) and other catastrophes which leads to a much needed Go Fund Me Campaign where no amount is too large or too small.

Kate Gale, the founder, editor and publisher told me when she accepted Blue Atlas that she didn’t expect that she would be publishing the same book she had just taken a couple of years later. She trusted me to keep revising, to keep making the manuscript better. That vote of confidence in me meant the world. Of course the final book went through a rigorous process of review before it was printed. I don’t know if Kate compared the two manuscripts but I did and I know that the book improved over those intervening years. From the first poem written for the book, “Not Monet’s Giverny,” published in the utterly delightful journal, Sweet: A Literary Confection, to the last poem, “Compass,” (v. long scroll down) was a ten year journey. Interestingly, the poems ended up next to each other in the collection. The format of Blue Atlas is intentionally fractured with no easy narrative for the reader to follow. Why? Because as a reader, I find books more interesting when I need to participate in the events and when the book’s organization is a bit like memory—scattered with its own inner logic.

Now as I take apart A Compass or a Companion, I feel a similar instinct. The movement between my early life growing up in a conservative Jewish home, my exposure to Hassidic Judaism in South Africa, my human rights work in Gaza and the West Bank and my current life on the Puget Sound seem linked in important ways. A linear narrative may be “safest” but it is hardly the most interesting. What is often called a braided narrative is what appeals to me most. It’s described in Demystifying the Narrative which Kelli Russell Agodon and I co-edited a couple of years ago—a book I highly recommend for sorting out how you want to put your manuscript together. (Spoiler alert: there are many ways.) In fact, Kelli and I refer to it when putting our own books together.

Are four themes too much for one book to hold? Is Judaism explored in Boston, Massachusetts and Cape Town, South Africa all one idea, then can I add my work in Gaza in the 1990’s (and current horrors) to my life in Seattle? Is the current trend to have books of poems work in a narrative or with a cohesive theme as if we were writing short stories really necessary? Is this simply a marketing ploy?

My mind keeps returning to letters written between William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov. Levertov wrote Williams that she gave her poems to her editor at New Directions and let him order the poems; then on at least one occasion, she took the poems New Directions didn’t want and gave them to an editor at another publishing house. She said “my job is to write the poems” and she honestly couldn’t be bothered with the ordering. Well, Williams admonished her for giving all that power away. Can you imagine both not having to do the messy work of ordering but to also give that power completely away?

Susan Rich, On this Last Day of July, Please Come Flying

My Name is Swan is my first authorised title. It has taken ten years to come into print. It contains just three poems, three long-form poems, carefully typeset over 120 beautifully bound pages. It is, I believe, the publisher’s intention to make the book – not simply this book, but all of their books – an event, an occasion, a celebration. Their mission is an act of rebellion against super-consumerism, a quest for the quiet preservation of poetry.

In the wake of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, for it is now Nolan’s and no longer Homer’s, the conversation has, for the most part, focussed on how ‘true’ the film has been to the ‘original’ story and what has been lost or gained by Emily Wilson’s adventurous translation. Little attention has been given to the poetry, to its oral machinery. The sensuality of language is absent entirely. There are no wine-dark seas or rosy-fingered dawns. Even its translator has argued the movie’s spectacle has overwhelmed the poem’s human intimacy. The epic film has superseded the epic poem.

Like the word ‘iconic’ or ‘legendary’, ‘epic’ itself is now used to describe anything from a night out to a breakfast spread. Epic poetry is something we consider largely consigned to the past. T.S. Eliot left it in pieces, offered us fragments with The Waste Land, a poem of remnants recovered from the ruins of world war.

Epic poems have been revisited by contemporary poets who lend a recognisable voice to resurrect ancient tales. Seamus Heaney wrestled with Beowulf and The Aeneid. Current Poet Laureate Simon Armatage breathed new life into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and this October will see the release of his translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh – a poem with the word epic ridden into its title.

October will also see the release of My Name is Swan which, rather than riding a great wave of public adulation, will glide slowly from the dark creeks, will appear hissing in river tributaries, will come ashore on silent, midnight slipways. I do regard this trilogy of works, taken as a whole, or in parts, particularly Reynard and Body 115 as epic poetry. Or at least an attempt at it.

These are epic times, this, an age of despots and tyranny, of fear and war and division, of rifts and conflict. This, surely, is an age for epic poetry.

Jan Noble, N°75 My Name Is Swan

I had been writing since the fall, which made up most of my income until I started more design-writing work later in the summer. I spent a lot of time writing Greek mythology and theater history related subject matter. As someone who had initially been hired to write strictly about literature as per my academic background, I’d also been permitted to take on myth/folklore, theater history, and because I was a practicing artist myself, visual art topics. Later, I wrote a lot architectural and design lessons, which gave me a solid launch into writing about decorating and design. But that summer, it was a lot of the Greeks, various lessons on The Odyssey, The Illiad, stage tragedies and comedies, myth in general, art in a mythological vein. I was also thinking about the idea of a female epic in the classical vein. Wading around so much in it for paid writing informed my creative writing and artmaking and soon, GRANATA, a series about Persephone and the  Sirens was hatched, along with a series of collages I would complete in the next year. Of course, in 2024-2025, I would follow it up with  CLOVEN, and something began to take shape. Not just these two collections of writing and art, but potential future ones that carried on that epic tradition. About Cassandra, Clytemnestra, Helen. Or Io, Leda, Daphne. (all possibilities for future series.)  And of course, Calypso,the one I planned to work on this summer.  I suppose you could also throw Ariadne/the Minotaur in that list, though TAURUS has always felt like something different. A contemporary retelling that takes a whole lot of liberties.  Over the past week since seeing the film, I’ve been thinking about Penelope and Circe, and potentials down the line for projects centered around them as well, which also have a lot of fertile material.  

At the same time, writing about myth seems really uncool as a subject matter. At least for poets. What do the Greeks offer us now? Maybe the answer is more than we think. Last night, I caught a glimpse of its powering nearly sold-out theater in the middle of downtown Chicago early on a summer evening when they could be doing literatally anything else. Granted, it had been a stormy afternoon and perfect for the cinema. But, turning my head, I saw the rapt faces of a large audience all in their recliners, inside a darkened theatre reliving a story that is thousands of years old. And that even in this anti-intelectual age, maybe the stories will make us okay, Not as a placebo or a distraction, but as a way to touch our shared humanity. To pluck it like Odysseus’ bow. To make it hum. 

Kristy Bowen, the myths that could save us

Despite Emily [Wilson]’s criticism of the food, the story, and the casting, the movie is doing more than fine because the greatness of this story, which has survived across centuries, continues to captivate. And in the ways it does and does not align with our current reality, it keeps us curious.

Being curious keeps your brain afloat; being stuck in your ways ages you. They say middle age is when your narrow waist and broad mind change place, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a surrender, giving in to the idea that the night is eternally dark and full of terror instead of moonlit and full of possibility.

As I find my way through my own story, one that has faced trials fit for an epic, I am moving toward conversations with fellow creatives who believe in the journey and help me understand what we can do next. I like to think that as Odysseus wandered homeward, he needed a plan. I have my own crew. We are learning. I am pivoting in ways that make us healthier.

We all like hero stories, and right now, the Red Hen staff are my heroes, as well as our authors. Indie publishing may be in a difficult spot, but this week, in a moment of celebration, Adela Najarro’s Variation in Blue won the American Book Award, and we all felt the glory. Through misunderstanding, through criticism, through myth, we find our way forward.

Kate Gale, Myth, Meaning & Survival: How Our Legends Shape Us

We recently entered a lovely, small, independent bookshop with our youngest niece (13) and nephew (10), both of whom enjoy reading books. The bookseller had taken wise advantage of the release of Christopher Nolan’s movie “The Odyssey” and, in the poetry section, featured a whole shelf of versions of the Illiad and the Odyssey: different formats, translators, paperback, hardback, illustrated, limited-edition–quite a range! Our nephew’s at the age where paintball and nerf-gun battles, fantasy graphic novels, swords, guns, and fireworks interest him. He’s heard about The Odyssey and was curious about it. “Is that the one where all the gods get together and make more gods?” he asked. *

“No, it’s the one about the man who leaves on a ship at the end of a long war and can’t get home because the gods keep intervening and sometimes he makes questionable decisions,” I said. “It’s the one with the Cyclops.” He knew a little about the Cyclops. He wondered if it was too advanced reading for him. But he has been reading the Harry Potter books on his own, so he is used to unusual names and words for things and persistent enough to keep on with a long book. I said he could probably get through it, though he might need a dictionary sometimes. We chatted a bit there in the store, with me telling him about how old the poem is (and it is a poem, I said, though some translations are written in prose) and how it was told out loud for many years but written down into books (and you know, of course, what books were like back then? “On, like, scrolls, right?”). Twenty-four books!

We looked at the various books…some in prose, some in poetry, some in prose but broken up into lines like poetry for academic reasons, some with footnotes. The proprietor was eavesdropping, amused, I think; he leaned over to show us a copy that had Greek on one page with the English verso, so that my nephew could see what the Greek looked like. He thought it was pretty cool. He chose a modestly-priced copy in flex-cover (see above left) because he liked reading the excerpts on the cover and because this one–the Butler translation from 1900–was written in prose. He thought he would find that more familiar, like reading a novel or a history. I said it might seem a little old-fashioned in style, but he’d probably be fine with it. “Old-fashioned like Shakespeare, or old-fashioned like ‘The Turn of the Screw’?” he asked. Precocious little fellow, no? More like Henry James than Shakespeare, I assured him. So he went home with a new book thousands of years old.

Ann E. Michael, Imaginary travels

When our friend the artist announced she was going to Antarctica with a science research group led by a local scientist for some ridiculously long time, we, her friends, said, um, we want to meet this dude, so we know whether this is a reasonable idea or not. So we made her throw a little party where she introduced us all and he gave us an overview of his research. We liked him, and his research was focused on this odd and interesting single celled creature about which he was weirdly and wonderfully excited, so we gave our general approval to the journey. Reader, she married him. And so began my personal journey with the foraminifera. These single celled organisms live throughout the ocean, some on the ocean floor, have a shifty relationship with oxygen, and have survived any number of earthly cataclysms to live out their little lives, making their little stone shells with their sort-of-arms, and eating whatever it is they eat, procreating in, well, I can’t keep track of what all they do. I’ve written poetry inspired by them, made videopoems. And you know how sometimes when you encounter something randomly and all of a sudden see it everywhere? I now find foraminifera in odd places in my reading journeys. One day I had some time to kill so went to the local library, found myself in the poetry section, randomly pulled out a volume of Wislawa Szymblorska, opened it at random, and, yes. So this post and poem goes out to my friend Sam.

Marilyn McCabe, in layers, since layers,

August has arrived, and unfortunately, with it, wildfires in my state. Spokane is in particular peril, and the smoke from many fires should arrive here tomorrow, along with hotter temperatures. Smoke and heat together are a tough thing for MS people but wildfires are much worse for the people forced to evacuate their homes.

It would be wrong to talk about the problems without some of the beauties – I walked out to my back garden one morning to see a pair of Swallowtail butterflies, and another morning to see a pair of quail calling to their brood of half-grown baby quail. The Buck Moon was particularly beautiful, too – probably due to some level of smoke in the higher atmospheres. The hummingbirds are still busy after the flowers. […]

I love spring, but in the Pacific Northwest, fall might be more welcome because it signals an end to increasingly blistering summers and the mellower beauties of September and October.

It was also announced that AWP was going to be in Portland in 2028, which was very cheering to me, since I have a hard time traveling (or justifying in the expense of flying) to AWP a lot of years, but Portland is just a three-hour drive. This means I feel an increased pressure to get a book out for spring 2028.

It made me think about how much of poetry publishing is out of our control, is a waiting game, where so often, we’re punched in the face with rejection, and only meted out small amounts of success at a trickle at best. When I was younger, I believed in being proactive – not waiting for the right job or person to come to me, but trying to figure out what I wanted and going for it. Have I lost that urge or ability over the years? We wait for a publisher or a journal to say yes, we wait for the poem or book to be published, all the while spinning the dice for – what – a small amount of praise in the form of a review, a small amount of money from a grant or a prize or if we get super lucky, an advance. It’s super frustrating – and I worry that, like some of my friends recently, they run out of time before they run out of poems.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Wildfires in WA State, Farms Opening for Fall and Beauties of Late Summer, AWP in Portland 28, Proactive in Poetry Publishing

I’ve been foraging for mushrooms some, although it’s been super-dry here, so I’m doing much more learning than eating. I’m also revising the poetry ms I put together in spring, which now seems further away from genuinely good than I originally thought, plus I’m now thinking hard about next year’s teaching. Dealing with AI isn’t my focus–the primary question is what I should teach my undergrads and how–but I confess to bolting awake, furious, early the other morning. I’d read the list of “Fall Academy” trainings and panel discussions my college is offering faculty during the last two weeks of August, and a really high proportion of them stress how to use AI in the classroom, without any counterpoint, even as my college touts its commitment to environmental sustainability–hmm. I am NOT curious about prompting Claude better. It seems obvious, as I follow the research, that while AI has valid uses, for example in managing large data sets, beginning writers shouldn’t use it for brainstorming, outlining, drafting, revision, or any of the other writing practices they need to develop to become smart humans with flexible skills and good judgment. Plus I really, really don’t want to spend my one wild and precious life reading any AI-generated text, as a grader or otherwise; I read for a sense of connection with other human beings. A “Fall Academy” session of genuine interest to me right now would focus on how, when, and why to recommit to the analogue. I calmed myself down, that morning, by overhauling my winter term syllabus for the first-year writing seminar. Here’s a draft of the course description:

Being Human: What can literary werewolves, cyborgs, ghosts, and fire-starting bears teach us about personhood? What does it mean to write in a human voice, with human help, for other humans? Why do these questions matter? Students in this class consider the boundaries of the human through stories and poems by Martha Wells, Stephen Graham Jones, Lily Yu, Stephen King, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and others. Note that this class requires physical books and old-school writing implements. [Not in the course description: HA! Take that, you corporation-brainwashed, data-center-building AI shills! I make policy exceptions for accessibility needs, always, because I am a human who wants to meet my human students where they are. Disability and neurodiversity will be course topics–the readings are fairly contemporary, and dehumanization of certain groups is definitely on writers’ minds.]

Added into my whirlwind of interesting preoccupations: I’m also prepping for travel to Colorado for some sightseeing and readings at the Telluride Mushroom Festival (seriously, check out the schedule, the event list is weird and amazing–what’s an “alchemical mushroom sound bath”?!). 

Lesley Wheeler, Curiosity kills the writer

Oh, I know the drill
with thrills; I’ve done my time in choirs, ecstatic,
shaken core-deep with the eternal swirl

of Bach’s Johannes-passion, its Herr,
Herr, Herr, the churn and whirr of winds and strings
that lift a hundred singers into air,

lost to our ordinary selves an hour
or two, the fugue tumbling around our heads.
That’s why I have my doubts about the power

of Art to save. The last few notes alight;
we sift out idly to the brilliant noon
of Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit;

and here we are: blinking at glare, adrift,
the grumpy dailiness of being human
hemming us dully in. 

Maryann Corbett, Gilt Complex

Last week, I mentioned Franz Wright’s book Axe in Blossom. And since then I’ve been playing with the phrase “bouquet of splendour” in my doodles. Remembering Hélène Cixous saying that we have all lived one or two flowers, and thinking about how these days some people have lived a whole bouquet of flowers. And yet, still they shine, they glow, they arrange themselves, they are composed, they are colourful, and refreshing, and their perfume is glorious. So. Please remember you are a bouquet of splendour.

Shawna Lemay, Bouquet of Splendour

The bowl that breaks on the kitchen floor makes

a chime like a bell. We sweep up its fragments and drop it
into the trash, where glistening bones of our fish dinner

lie almost intact. And still we want everything we do,
though the world breaks our hearts every single time.

Luisa A. Igloria, Inventory

This week: jars of feathers, the fifth demon, the darkness of tunnels, the expressive face of a walrus, and much more. Enjoy.

How does it all not crack you, not elicit some kind of fugue state? How can we be expected to stomach this endless nervous system dysregulation? I’ve heard from many writers that they’re feeling the same thing. When I posted about this on FB, some people couldn’t even muster more than a sentence in agreement—a collective “ugh, me too.”

This exhaustion is palpable, especially in communities of us sensitive writers, writers who want to process and create, but who are paralyzed, caught in a schism between the collective suffering and the joy of creation. At some point, the schism collapses, and we realize we are one—one body, one big breathing organ, one endless sigh, one celebration, one dead body, one beating heart—and so how does art translate this?

How do we perpetually live in and reevaluate “Trump’s America” (I say through gritted teeth) and pandemic bodies and genocide reality? How do we manage an endless livestream of terror against the softness of our poetries and the resilience we’re told to endlessly cultivate as artists?

Because certainly my art cannot be divorced from my grief and my exhaustion—from our grief and our exhaustion? And certainly, I cannot write when protective anhedonia sings its songs of total futility. I cannot write with my eyes closed, but I cannot write with my eyes open.

Maybe I get less soft? Maybe I just fucking fall apart more often? Maybe we sit in the limbo and feel the half-feelings and the no-feelings that mask the real feelings. I choose to believe that even the voidstate knows it is temporary; otherwise it wouldn’t be a void. It wouldn’t have a name.

Eventually the body wakes up. Right? Right? We’re rebooting. We just need a holy minute.

I am reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem The Uses of Sorrow. I can’t help but think of the inertia as a container, a strange engine maybe. A horse waiting at the water’s edge before bolting down the shoreline.

Lisa Marie Basile, Summer of anhedonia

I do with courage what I do with grief.
Swipe left. Keep scrolling.
Shush the voices in my ears.
How much of both do I need
to walk up to the image
in the mirror?

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Remember

Coming from the US to France: out of the frying pan, into the fire.  Heat wave – canicule, in French – refers to dog days, which even Homer wrote about in The Iliad: 

Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.

The landscape is tinder-dry; pine needles are so emaciated, thin, dropping their long sharp nails to soften paths.  Rings of fires rage now along the Atlantic coast, the Mediterranean whistles through its teeth, biding its time. France is facing its fourth canicule. 

You could say that the image of France as a place of alluring summer is done.  (In domino effect, myths of the US is done, Israel is done.)  But France is stubborn.  A town like Aix-en-Provence will get sultry and suffocating. But under the classically elegant platane trees, nothing could look quite so French as those shaded, effortless drinkers. Aix’s golden-hued limestone buildings are centuries old; the cool blue shutters on their windows older than the ages of most friends added together, and taller than four standing on each other’s shoulders.  What are people doing? Eating, drinking and talking.  Eternal stuff. 

Jill Pearlman, Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. The object today is just to put words on the page, thoughts into my brain, and to write.

today’s light breeze
I remember
hearing her laughter

Ann E. Michael, Endeavoring

I just had tea with the lovely poet, person, and letterpress publisher Emily Hancock of St. Brigid Press. She’s planning an ecopoetry event at Stone Soup Books in Waynesboro, Virginia on September 13th, and I’ll be part of it, with Jeanne Larsen, Sarah Ann Winn, and, we hope, a relative of Karenne Wood to discuss that poet’s work. We batted around possible panel questions as well as talking about midlife, meditation, ADHD, children, and fur babies. Two red threads were the topics of attention and connection: how writing and reading as practices help us attend to the human and the more-than-human worlds, as well as forging unlikely but restorative connections among them.

Connection is my “Flood subject,” to use Emily Dickinson’s phrase (hers was immortality). Of my books of traditional poetry scholarship, one focuses on enclosure, the other voice–communication, that is, and the various twisty, indirect, yet resonant ways poems speak or perform silence. Talking about poems in classrooms and criticism has been my livelihood. I love it; my introversion somehow yields, or even becomes an asset, when I’m part of a group passing around, analyzing, and admiring a “machine made of words” (that’s W.C. Williams). But poetry as communication? As I’ve written elsewhere, a poem makes a lousy telephone. The signal is just too delayed and beset by noise. The strongest poems convey urgency, yet if you have a message that’s urgent in the usual sense–“Help, my car broke down!” or even “I love you, please move in with me”–you should probably choose another linguistic medium to make sure it gets through.

Yet I receive poems as communication all the time and am wildly grateful for the mind-to-mind, long-distance, time-machine-style intimacy they enable. I often write, too, as a way to imagine perspectives alien to mine, how a tree might think, or a mountain, or a god. That’s not to claim I get it right, ever. But there’s value in the attempt.

Lesley Wheeler, Poetic circuitry

There’s a part of me that is soft and creative and there’s a part of me that is a work bitch, and I like both parts. I like the design element, the creativity, the build up, the community. I like knowing what is going to happen and when. I like the feeling of hitting goals, making a really good job of it. I like noodling away on Canva; pulling a vibe together for a poster. I like the research, the layering of knowledge into a teachable subject.

But the flip side of that is that everything is then down to me. I wear all the hats. ALL THE HATS: social media, marketing, promotion, design, IT. It means that to run a big course there needs to be a design strategy, a promotion strategy. I need to be online a lot, I need to be pushing a lot and investing in promotional aids to make sure I can reach as many people as I can. All of this, of course, is unpaid work, until the course meets its predetermined number of sign ups that ensures all costs are covered – the platforms I need to use, any paid help with tech stuff, promotion costs, my time, facilitator time, all that sort of stuff. I will run a course if the basics are met and my time is covered and everyone is paid. But I can’t run a course if I come out in the negative.

I am a writer, but I’m also a business. To cancel a course is to strategise. But also, I’m a person with feelings and to cancel anything that I’ve placed in the public eye so prominently is embarrassing. I can feel the gaze of people on me, especially people who think I shouldn’t be where I am. I used to know these people in real life, but I think they exist only in my head now. These nay sayers who creep around the edges of my own self doubt exist in a terrible review I once got (I will write to you about this one day), a snarky Facebook message I once received (seems like anyone can call themselves a writer these days) a few folk who were not brave enough to chase this for themselves and choose to sit idly in the wings with their dreams at their feet waiting for me to fall, as if it would prove to them that they were right not to try.

Look at this, I’m giving myself a pep talk automatically. Pat on the back for Wend.

Because that’s what it is to keep going, isn’t it. You might call it thick skin, but it isn’t, it’s about strategy. 

Wendy Pratt, I hope you are failing well

Occasionally I’m oddly undone by a casual comment. A month ago I ran into an old colleague, someone to whom I feel warmly and always enjoy seeing her. But she said two innocuous things that left my brain whirring around and my pie hole flappin soundlessly. She said, “You look good.” Comments about my looks always throw me. What do I say? I don’t really pay much attention to my looks, don’t think about them much. I mean, I try to look presentable. But beyond that I’m not always sure what I look like. What does “good” mean in the context of an aging chick who glances in the mirror and figures good enough? And do I say, “So do you” right away, or does that seem too…I don’t know…insincere or transactional. So I smiled brightly, I think, and said something like, “Oh.” Then she said, again, perfectly inoccuously and in that way of idle small talk, “Busy summer?” It threw me into this thoughtswirl of, oh yes, I guess it is summer, but it’s really only just started, and it’s not my favorite season so I pretty much just wait for it to be over, and I just got back from a trip so do I tell her that or was that really “spring” not summer and so doesn’t really answer her question and anyway am I going to have a busy summer? do I actually have anything planned… At which point I figured my silence was very awkward so I think I said something like, “Oh…” And then we had to part to find our seats at the performance at which we had run into each other, me feeling like an idiot and her probably wondering what had happened to me. All this to say that the quotidian can seem bizarre, thoughts can go spurting off like a just-burst balloon around the room, and the brain is a funny thing of words, sometimes. Which I guess is why I’m a writer. I love this poem by Victoria Chang for its wrestling with all kinds of little things and big. 

Marilyn McCabe, to my one life, when I will finally be wordless. What

High summer in Herefordshire, and the land is holding its breath. The verges have gone lion-coloured, the fields were cut early and no aftermath has followed, the clay in the gate-gaps has opened into crazy-paving, and the Wye is running so low that it has started to show its bones — gravel shoals where there is usually a river. Eight areas of England are now officially in “prolonged dry weather”, the polite phrase for the stage before drought, and central England is in its longest run of dry days since 1995. It is a hard season to love and an extraordinary one to look at — because a dry year takes things away from the land, and everything it takes away discloses something. All three of this week’s finds know that.

1. A poem to enjoy — Alice Oswald, “Dunt: A Poem for a Dried-up River” — Oswald took as her starting point a small Roman carving of a water nymph found in Gloucestershire, and set her the impossible task the title announces: to summon a river — the little Dunt — out of dry limestone. The poem proceeds by failure; again and again the nymph tries and the instruction comes back to try again, and the river arrives, when it arrives at all, as barely a trickle in a ditch. It won the Forward Prize for best single poem in 2007, and it reads this month like reportage.

Adam Cairns, Three by one

1. Jesus fasted forty days in the desert, and was tempted by Satan. Paradise Regained is John Milton’s re-telling of those temptations, with expansions and inventions. In Milton’s version, Jesus is openly unmoved by the temptations, he is absolutely immune: fitting, theologically, but it makes Paradise Regained a dramatic poem with very little drama. The original, in the Gospel of Luke, is short, curt, more mysterious and more interesting.

2. Two moments do draw attention. First, in Book III, after several failures, Satan turns to praise, attempting an indirect temptation to worldly glory:

I see thou know’st what is of use to know,
What best to say canst say, to do canst do;
Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words
To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart
Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape.

Equipped with such goodness, why does Jesus not go and exercise it?

These godlike virtues wherefore dost thou hide?
Affecting private life, or more obscure
In savage wilderness, wherefore deprive
All earth her wonder at thy acts, thyself
The fame and glory…

Jesus’s reply is surprising, for its dim view of those he’s tasked to save:

For what is glory, but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar….

Such misanthropy! Where is man made in God’s image? Where is man made a little lower than the angels?

Brad Skow, Paradise Regained Read Blind

Angels have been flitting in and out of [Philip] Gross’s verse from the beginning, often imagined as the most ordinary things: dust in the poem of that name from the 1991 collection The Son of the Duke of Nowhere (Faber & Faber); a stone gargoyle tries to become an angel in ‘Gargangel’ (from The Wasting Game, Bloodaxe, 1998); even water as it passes through a sluice forms momentary angel wings in the striking first poem (‘Sluice Angel’) of The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009).

The tall shut doors of the hall
of the world at which the weight of water,
of incipience, does not need to knock:
feel it there like a shudder
of difference, the engine of change.
Now, almost soundless, hinges shift.
With a gradual calibrated rip
like a concord of lathes, with a crypt smell,
two green-grey-brown stiffening blades
of water fold in. They curve, feathering
themselves in free fall: wings
flexed, shuddering, not to soar [. . . ]

Angels imply religion of course, though not any particular one, and that too is typical. Gross’s poetry has been somewhat religious in orientation for a long time, though markedly uncertain; monotheistic in flavour but not really Christian (I can’t recall a single mention of Christ); God always far-off, hard to contact, and not necessarily attentive. If there is revelation to be found, we sense that it is in the everyday and — ironically, for a poet — as much in silence as in speech. (I think, though I’m not sure, that Gross is a Quaker — at least, I noticed years ago that his books were always stocked by the Society of Friends bookshop on the Euston Road — and if so this is no doubt relevant to the importance of silence in his poetry.)

The verse sequence to which the 2022 title alludes, ‘Thirteen Angels’, comes at the end of the book. Its thirteen poems recall Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, but it is headed by a quotation from D. H. Lawrence, a short poem called in the original ‘Song of a Man’ (though that rather aggrandising title is not used here):

What is the knocking
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
Is it someone come to do us harm?
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

This has a quasi-scriptural feel. Lawrence is remembering or half-remembering various different bits of the Bible, including, probably, Luke 11:5-8, a parable about knocking at a friend’s door at midnight to borrow three loaves of bread for an unexpected guest; the calling of Samuel in the night (1 Samuel 3); and the three strangers to whom Abraham offers hospitality in Genesis 18, who turn out to be angels. The way in which Gross uses a quotation of Lawrence’s sub-scriptural fragment to place himself at a further remove from formal religious authority feels representative of his attitude as a whole – although always several uncertain removes away from any specific creed, this is for all that religious poetry of a kind.

The thirteen angels of the sequence are all evocatively vague, both impossible to grasp and touchingly routine – described as breath, ‘A Glassy Thing’, a ‘kind of Music’; ‘flow’; even ‘Inconsistency’ and ‘Emptiness’; they appear ‘at the interfaces [. . .] between us, each and each other / and each and the tumult of things’. One ‘clears its throat / like white noise, like a waterfall, like wind’ (‘Who’d Have Thought’). The thirteenth angel is ‘not so much the uninvited / at the christening as the one / there are no words for in the language’; there’s a suggestion that this angel is the recording angel (‘In fifty years, too late / for you, this will all seem so clear; / the thirteenth angel will have written the page // on which your name’); in the final line of the collection, it is ‘the world itself’. The typical movement of many of Gross’s poem, for which these quotidian angels are a kind of metaphor, is from the precisely observed everyday-made-strange – whether from the natural or domestic world – to a religious sensibility, questions about our place not so much in society or the family but in the universe.

Victoria Moul, One of the lesser order of recording angels

I miss the fifth demon most.
I lost them, and then I lost
him, and now I have only the tomb
of my empty mind.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Poems for the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene

Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Rupert Brooke, to name three poets whose poems have appeared in this space, as well as Charles Sorley, Julian Grenfell, and Isaac Rosenberg, have in common the fact that they were English poets born sometime between 1875 and 1895 — and they all died between 1915 and 1918, mostly on the French battlefields of World War I. Brooke is a dropped stitch in this pattern, having died in Greece, of blood poisoning from an insect bite, and not in battle.

Still, he belongs, one of the lost World War I poets, a tragic club whose fame and pathos lie chiefly in its members’ unrealized potential. But in their truncated lifetimes, some of them were very good poets. Edward Thomas, for example, achieved a quiet greatness in his “Adlestrop,” possibly the most famous war poem to take peace as its subject. Of many others we might say that a golden age of English poetry lay dead in the trenches. Or it might not. We’ll never know how good they would have been.

But then there’s the other club of war poets: the ones who made it out alive. That list is longer than one might think. It includes the poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who came home but left his sanity in the trodden French mud. It includes Robert Graves, who went on to write the series of “I, Claudius” novels. It includes Edmund Blunden, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a post currently held by the American poet A.E. Stallings). It includes the French poet Joseph Seguin, whose war-themed haiku, written under the name Julien Vocance, we featured just last week in Alfred Nicol’s excellent translations. And it includes Siegfried Sassoon, whose 1919 poem “Idyll” appears here today.

This poem, written in the first year after the cessation of horrors, reads like a sigh of relief. In six rhymed pentameter couplets, it sketches a scene of utter peace, Edenic in the unrealized light of a summer morning, before reaching its reason for being. Its speaker, stepping into this garden to await a lover, does so in the awareness that his life and future have been handed back to him.

This landscape signals, for him, in the wake of the cacophony of battle and the utter destruction of beauty that it wreaks, a restoration of order and quietness. In this landscape to which he has returned whole, he is reborn, brought back from death, alive to watch the inchoate day sharpen into focus and become what it will become. And if what that day became, for Sassoon the poet, was never quite the glorious dream our imaginations grant the fallen, still it’s something to have lived to see that day.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Idyll

Dividing Rivers, by Ivy Schweitzer:

When I vow never to watch the play again
where loving to death is the only resistance,
they turn their backs,
mount their seats and
ride off—together.

The play in question in this poem, “Death in Stratford,” is Shakespeare’s Othello, which I haven’t read in many, many years. The poem’s occasion is a meeting between Schweitzer’s speaker and the actors who play Othello and Desdemona in a production that the speaker just saw. The speaker tells us she’d forgotten that Othello actually kills Desdemona twice, once by smothering, when he “swear[s] he will love her/‘after,” and the second time by strangling her “with her own sheets,/forgiveness staining her lips.” When the speaker asks the actors how they “act it over and over”—Schweitzer relies on the verb “croak” to render how the question is asked, allowing us to decide precisely what emotion is behind it—the woman who plays Desdemona, whom we know is white because we know the play and not because the poem mentions race at all, explains that they get their motivation from the need to make sure that the audience “get[s] it:”

“[T]hey are both victims of white patriarchy
but resist it
by loving, dying, Othello killing her and them himself out of a world
they cannot survive in—”

That statement elicits the vow I quoted above which also how the poem ends, but the tension between what the vow implies—that the speaker is committing herself to a search for a form of resistance rooted in a life-affirming love—and the way in which the actors turn their backs on that implication is in many ways the tension that animates Dividing Rivers as a whole. The book begins with poems that confront the antisemitism Schweitzer has experienced, allowing that confrontation to allude to the history of Jewish oppression, and then moves into poems that explore the relationship between Jewishness and the whiteness into which Jews who can pass as white have been allowed. The poems that dominate in the third of the book’s three sections explore Schweitzer’s not-always-successful but always contingent attempts to move back and forth across the “dividing river” that gives the book its title. That crossing, the willingness to attempt it, to take responsibility for the attempt, and to be held accountable for it is where this book locates its moral center, the life-affirming resistance I wrote about above.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #57

Across the language of [Kevin] Davies’ impossibly-long threaded lines, a mélange of words pushed in against each other to splatter, purposefully disrupt and undermine, and eventually rebuild, meaning. All of this, also, while including what seem a uniquely scattered list of references, such as the American Revolution, playing catch in the dark, ancient Rome, paradise and old debt, Shakespeare’s Caliban and discipline, snowfall and swaths of crossed-out text. Davies’ language swirls gymnastically around and through critiques of capitalism and culture, an evolving poetics that evolved out of early engagement with and through The Kootenay School of Writing into something more expansive and even evasive […]

As part of that same Jacket2 interview, Inniss references [… Philadelphia poet Ron] Silliman’s review of [Davies’] The Golden Age of Paraphernalia from his blog, where he writes, ‘Davies appears to have found a spot exactly halfway between language poetry and flarf.’” Nearly a decade earlier, Joshua Clover offered this about Davies’ work in Boston Review: “This is how I think about Kevin Davies’s poems, for which few if any of the possible metaphors seem even close: weather, the fractured encyclopedia, disobedience. His poetry is not especially metaphorical in the first place; it is more a kind of realism, for a real world that seems all too often not just too awful, but too incalculable and messy to look at in its full unfolding.”

When two words are placed side by side, of course, they can’t help but sit in relation, and thus, a narrative sense of meaning, from left to right (or up to down, or however words are placed against each other). And yet, there’s almost a similar kind of overarcing floating narrative created across these short bursts to the prose work of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, how the present and the surreal offer steps across a complex grid, and composed of sections that may or may not connect to the larger narrative. “Anyway that’s my tale and now it’s done. / The young woman took my chair when I stood / briefly to wash my beak. / And then would not move her legs to // allow me to retrieve my bundle / from beneath the chair,” he writes, near the end of the collection, as part of the rather lengthy section sixty-eight, “and that is when I felt myself / turning into pressed wool and about to go haywire.”

rob mclennan, Kevin Davies, Transfer Portal

Wearing the odd cycle-clip and drinking a pint of beer or two doesn’t stop you from writing great poetry […] I hereby proclaim Larkin’s “Love Songs in Age” as the century’s greatest poem.

These are the words of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, writing to the Guardian newspaper in October 1991. They were reported in a Guardian profile of the Labour politician earlier this month, which noted that he sent the letter while living at home in Warrington after finishing his degree in English Literature at Cambridge.

You don’t get to be Prime Minister without being a political creature from an early age. Soon, Burnham was living in London, working as a Labour parliamentary assistant in the run-up to Tony Blair’s 1997 general election victory, and then as a special adviser to culture secretary, Chris Smith, in 1998 — which presumably means he was in the meetings where Andrew Motion (Larkin’s official biographer) emerged as the New Labour choice for Poet Laureate after the death of Ted Hughes.

Burnham’s fan letter is written with the light good humour favoured by newspaper letters pages (“wearing the odd cycle-clip” nods to Larkin’s ironic self-portrait in “Church Going”: “Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”). But it’s not an unpolitical document. In the days before social media, writing a letter to a newspaper was one of the best ways to make your opinions a matter of public record. Burnham’s successful strategy to become Prime Minister — by first becoming the down-to-earth, music-loving Mayor of Greater Manchester — has been a long game of affirming popular opinions. It might seem a stretch to say that this down-to-earth, poetry-loving letter represents his first step on the road to power. But bear with me as we browse the Guardian in 1991 to establish exactly what it meant to tell the readers of Britain’s only left-wing broadsheet newspaper that you were a Larkin fan — because it turns out that it almost literally put you on the same page as the Labour leadership.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, “Little Englandism of the Left”

A walk in Cardiff “On the esplanade” prompts the poem’s speaker to observe a row of Edwardian villas once inhabited by people with money after working up to managerial level,

and like many who come into money
I imagine a new life

amongst my cohort of coined bohemians
secure academics

no thought of history
I’m too dazzled by possibility

that one day
I shall own such a property

paint my front door red
then close it tightly, ‘gainst the world outside

Here the poem’s speaker imagines his neighbours would be like him, bohemian and academic rather than bland managerial classes keeping up appearances. The poem’s speaker sets up a contradiction: he wants to paint the door a colour that stands out and marks his house as his but also wants to shut it against the world. It’s his private retreat where he doesn’t have to share.

“Memento Mori” is a thoughtful, crafted series of poems that look at how small moments in navigating the world can provoke memories, some welcome some not so welcome, that enhance understanding of relationships with others and the world at large. The moments of wry humour and self-deprecation lift this from nostalgia and self-focus into poem which challenge and question what makes us.

Emma Lee, “Memento Mori” Gareth Writer-Davies (Yaffle Press) – book review

Elizabeth Osmond is a neonatal consultant and a poet who has twice won prizes in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Her work has been published in The Aftershock Review, The Alchemy Spoon, Dust Poetry, Atrium, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The Craft of Care Anthology (Black Pear 2026).

Beth kindly sent me a review copy of Hatchery, but it had already been on my radar since she launched it. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing her read at several online open mics, and already knew her to be a poet of great skill and sensitivity. As a medic, she has access to a rich vein of language that in other hands may be overly dry or technical, but Beth is able to draw the poetic out of it. She has a keen eye for the curios and the artefacts of medical history, turning them over for us in her poems so we can see them in all their strangeness. However, these aren’t simply presented for curiosity’s sake, but to highlight the imaginative leaps that have been necessary to even slightly increase the survival rates of very premature babies. Here is the Kinderbrutanstalt, the child hatchery, with its jars of feathers, its early incubators, and Ward Rounds with Queen Victoria.

This is one of my favourite poems in the collection, bringing Queen Victoria onto a modern day neonatal unit, her own experiences as a mother in contrast with those of today, yet connected through some ghostly residue of feeling that must transcend eras and technologies;

“ … She delivered Leopold after the blessed chloroform / enclosed in his nursery / playmates forbidden / lest he fall and bruise”

Present in all these poems is a prevailing sense of the dignity and humanity with which Beth treats her subjects. She handles field observations with real care and feeling. Although poetry frequently moves me, it rarely makes me physically well up in the way some of these poems do. When she writes “Here you are, my impatient little friend” in I wish I could write you a prescription for time, I find in this moment such care and tenderness, and it is the perfect pivot to end a poem about trying to negotiate more time for a baby who is already on the way. You get the impression that these conversations are ones Beth the consultant and her colleagues are always having, as they move about the ward, perhaps as much to reassure themselves as the tiny lives in their care. In Conversation, her “heart is wanting to be fearless / but it is a colander with little holes / through which doubt seeps in”. To feel this very human doubt and vulnerability and daily find a way to move past this is a special thing.

Victoria Spires, Hatchery

Homer Haunted is a swift, lively, and informative book about the way English poets have translated Homer. It begins with George Chapman and ends with three living writers. Henry Power, an English professor at Exeter, is especially compelling about Alexander Pope and Christopher Logue, two great Homer translators. Indeed, I loved how much this book loves Pope, whose phenomenal accomplishments and influence on later poets are as inescapable as they ought to be. Anyone who wishes to understand how Homer has been understood by the English poets will learn from and enjoy this book.

There are wonderful accounts of writers like Matthew Arnold and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Power is a keen explicator of Logue’s techniques not just of “imagism” but of his use of camera language, quotations from popular culture, instructions, the addition of words like “consider” and “imagine” to Homeric images. He quotes very nicely, and has a knack for telling a story without letting the book get dragged under by the modern impulse for all narrative non-fiction to become a chain of anecdotes that cannot bear the weight of their conclusions.

The most surprising part of this book, for me, was discovering the sheer weird variety of translations undertaken by Victorians, who produced: an Anglo-Saxon-style Homer, one in Spenserian stanzas, one as an Icelandic saga, and a version that was cast in the language of the King James Bible.

Henry Oliver, Homer Haunted, by Henry Power

My previous post on the subject of bad poetry prompted some thoughtful responses, and I felt my own responses to these were worth gathering in a follow-up essay. So I drafted one – back at the end of March, in fact, on a train to Southampton. Since then I’ve only had time to think on it in short gasps, but that process has, oddly enough, resulted in much more of a complete thesis than I’d originally envisaged – more cheery too, if you’ll bear with me till the end.

I said previously that bad poems need to be invented, and to vastly outnumber good ones, in order for the poetry critic to have a function. But there’s another, simpler reason why bad poetry must be willed into existence. Suppose for a moment that every published poem – or the vast majority of them – were unquestionably skilfully written, greatly rewarding reader attention. There would still be far, far too many of them for any one person to attend to. We would need to come up with a way of deciding which poems to spend our limited time investigating.

That need, really, is the root of literary taste. Whatever system or standard we put into place, it operates as a means of dismissing from our mind much that exists – or, at least, sending it to the very periphery of conscience – so that we can focus on a more manageable portion. And since it’s easier to dismiss something if we come up with reasons to regard it as ‘bad’, or nurture an ingrained distaste for it, this is what we do. […]

I should add that literary taste also exists, like many things, for the purpose of forming social bonds. To put it crudely: convincing yourself you find a certain kind of poem to be very fine and another sort very drab is sometimes a precondition of being accepted within certain social circles. I will address this as I go on — partly because I think it bears repeating that most of those who claim to be solely interested in ‘the quality of the poem itself’ are not being honest with themselves.

But I’m mostly concerned with the core function of taste and the role criticism has to play in it. We need taste to direct us to the poems that are of most use in enriching and improving our lives. If we do not cultivate taste of some kind, then we don’t know where to start or how to sort through the mass of poetry available, and so can hardly benefit from the artform at all — which is, in fact, the position of those millions who never read or think about it.

Jon Stone, ESSAY: What is a bad poem exactly? (Part 2)

The idea that poetry must rhyme is not unusual. In fact views about what is and isn’t poetry abound not just amongst non-poets but amongst poets too. The poetry world has its fair share of people who will tell you that what you have written isn’t proper poetry, or if it does qualify, that it is somehow unworthy. Fans of formal structure may look down their noses at those who favour free verse. Those who write in blank verse have been known to sneer at rhyme enthusiasts, who are divided between those who see no harm in using a rhyming dictionary, and those who would never admit to stooping so low as to use one, even though they have rhymezone bookmarked on their browsers. People who write from prompts run the risk of being derided for lacking sufficient imagination to create ideas of their own. People who announce that they wrote a piece at a workshop are sniggered at in some quarters by poets who proclaim that nothing of quality can be produced without being closeted within the silent confines of a writing den. Others swear that you should never draft in anything other than pencil in a physical notebook, scowl at those who draft on a computer and have no time at all for those who use their phones, whilst many of those who swear by their computers and phones are prone to think of the notebook and pencil brigade as primitive poets stuck in the past.

Of course, sensible poets such as you and I know that a good poem is a good poem whatever form it takes and whatever the circumstances of its creation. It is what the piece says that counts, and if it says something that makes a connection with originality and style, then, at least in my book, it is a good poem.

It is my heartfelt belief that the vast majority of human beings on this planet are capable of writing good poetry, but unfortunately very few do. I believe that the reason for this has a lot to do with what people perceive good poetry to be. Anyone who feels that good poetry has to follow a set of rules around rhyme, structure, form, syntax etc is denying themselves the possibility of stumbling upon different ways of working and expressing themselves.

I think that we are all capable of writing good poetry because we all have a unique perspective on the world. We all have a different ideas and experiences, different associations in our minds, different perspectives and different personalities. Maybe the fact that we all have different DNA plays a part too. Maybe all of these things add up to some sort of poetic DNA which can leave its fingerprint on the things that we write. By trying to stick to some perceived rules of poetry for no better reason than we believe that poetry has to be dome in a certain way, we are distorting that fingerprint, and allowing less of our poetic DNA to shine through.

This is why AI produced poetry is ultimately unsatisfying. AI poetry is completely constructed of rules. By definition it can never be present a unique human perspective as every perspective, methodology and idea within it has to come from databases and sorted mathematically from a list of probabilities. Only a human can be surprising, original, and fabulous.

Mike O’Brien, Forget the Rules of Poetry

Everywhere I walk,
it seems there’s a thread I can pull on, attached
to a picture hiding in plain sight. I know I want
to be addressed, to feel some kind of touch
which I might find reassuring. But the dark,
glossy sheen of bird feathers, the speckled
rind on fruit and the sugar beginning to foam
out of its pores can be presence enough. Not
certainty, just the briefest mark of grounding.

Luisa A. Igloria, Making Meaning

— I picked up Derek Beaulieu’s book from the library: Do It Wrong: How to Be a Poet in the Twenty-First Century. And it’s for poets, but anyone creating art will find it useful. As most of my readers here are non-Canadians, Derek Beaulieu is sort of our version of Austin Kleon, for context. He’s weirder, edgier, and probably wears a tuque more often, than his American counterpart. He tells Canadian artists to stop comparing ourselves to American ones. “Cut the fantasies and the bullshit: the grass isn’t greener elsewhere. The only way forward is through cultural action, working together, and creating artwork that imagines and advocates for a bigger, weirder future, no matter what side of the boarder you find yourself on.”

— “Imagine a book,” says Beaulieu, “you don’t know you want to read. Write to discover that book, to expand your idea of what is possible and what you can imagine yourself writing”

— He also reminded me of this from Virginia Woolf: “What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”

— Which then reminded me of my favourite line from Phyllis Webb, “The proper response to a poem is another poem.” This is not in the Beaulieu book (unless I missed it) but could be. Perhaps his next. Anyway, such a good book for new writers and old crotchety ones such as meself.

Shawna Lemay, The Axe, My Writing Into the Desk Era, and Other Bouquets

The poem in the video below was inspired by Langston Hughes’ Island. It was developed by running it thorugh a series of Google Translate operations and also an N+7 operation. Then editing. I think this is an example computer-aided composition without using AI (though I suspect—OK, I know—there is AI in Google Translate.) There is a difference between LLM-using generative AI and computer-assisted work. For me, the process “makes things strange” and offers up some textual materials to explore, all of which is infused with the aura of the original. How I respond to the materials and the aura is part of my poetic process. For me, these aura-filled texts often confound and inspire and my work as a poet is to someone work with the material to arrive at some genuine “poesis” —the sense that the text is more than the sum of its parts. I don’t know that it is that much different than writing after being inspired by a poet or poetic tradition, other than generating some related material to respond to. I should say that the poem that I settled on it very traditional and doesn’t confront the norms of conventional poetry except in its mode of composition. I’ve been using computer-aided operations since the 80s, though definitely not exclusively. I don’t see this as much different than rolling up one’s sleeves and addressing the affordances of a sonnet or villanelle or Frank O’Haraian “It’s 12:15 and this and then that” convention.

Gary Barwin, You Know Whose Mouth This Is: AI, not-AI, sincerity and invention.

The word is
one-room apartment reef
or mingling octopuses,
licking salt from punctuation
one goosebump at a time.

On land, they call it
love.

Kati Mohr, Even this …

Ten years ago I read my long, narrative poem My Name is Swan at a literary festival. It was a curated evening around the theme of ‘The City’. I appeared halfway up (or halfway down) the programme along with a number of well established and highly regarded authors whose work I greatly admired. I was pretty chuffed to have such a billing as a relatively obscure artist among such prestigious writers. I was, in the contemporary vernacular, ‘a minor poet’. I don’t mind being a minor poet, I prefer to sing in minor keys not in a major ones. Most good art is made in minor keys. Hits are written in major keys because they emotionally resonate more immediately. The songs that stay with us though contain shadows, minor chords, modal turns, notes of regret. What makes a song endure is not happiness but happiness corrupted by the knowledge of loss.

None of the other authors came to my reading. They were not disinterested or deliberately shunning me, much as the voices in my head would like to tell me. No, they were simply elsewhere, doing what authors are supposed to do, trying to earn a living from their work. They were meeting their public, standing behind their merchandise stalls, selling their books. I didn’t have a book. I didn’t have anything to sell. I had a poem. And while I read it, it was alive and after I’d finished it went to the place that poems go, where the wind lives, where midnight sighs arrive, where love hides.

The modern book, as we know it, printed with bound pages, has only been with us for around five hundred years. Writing itself emerged around five thousand years ago but the origins of poetry are ancient, perhaps stretching back into pre-history. 50,000 years ago humans were almost certainly using rhythm and repetition, chanting and song and formulaic language came into existence long before any of it was written down. The availability of cheaper paper made from wood pulp and the advent of industrial printing, meant that by the 1800s the book had become a mass-market object. With the arrival of the 20th century paperback, books were ubiquitous. The international best seller was upon us.

The introduction of the book meant we no longer needed to listen to our tribal elders, to hear their stories. We lost, perhaps a little of the ability to even listen to each other. Everything was written down for us, to be studied or stacked on high shelves, hidden away in academy libraries. Books became power. A new kind of truth had arrived. One that was absolute because, as you know, if it’s in a book then, well, it must be true.

I left the authors with their stalls, with their sales, with their transactions and I took my poem home wondering where I might go with it next. A book didn’t feel like the right fit for My Name is Swan somehow. It was a poem that needed to feel the wind in its feathers, have air under its wings, it needed an adventure. It needed to live. Back then I believed books were where poems went to die. Don’t get me wrong. I love books. If you’ve written one I might even have it on my shelves. If I haven’t then send me copy because honestly I do really love books. I just felt that this poem, and the other long form works that I’d made, had a life beyond the page.

Jan Noble, N°74 Books are where poems go to die

I recently joined poet and podcast host Nathan Hassall on The Poetry Vessel, a multimedia poetry project he creates with his wife, Rachael. Their show blends poetry, conversation, and visual interpretation, creating a space where language becomes a shared exploration. It was a joy to be a guest and talk about submission strategies, poetry communities, creative advocacy, and the work we do to support poets.

Nathan and I talk about the origins of my work, the role of literary citizenship, and how poets can navigate the publishing world with intention. We also explore the imaginative engine behind poetry — the alter egos we write through, the personas that surface on the page, and how imagination becomes a tool for both discovery and protection.

I read a poem from my collection A Godless Ascends, which opened up a conversation about writing through personal history, mythic framing, and the emotional architecture of a poem. Nathan’s questions invite a kind of reflection that feels both intimate and expansive, and the episode captures that dynamic beautifully.

Trish Hopkinson, How I Got My Poetry Published in 2026 (ft. Trish Hopkinson) + submission call via The Poetry Vessel

He cautions himself against memories
their cheat, their fumbling feet moving
across the arc of time.

Still.

The soft twilights,
the bob white whistling,
the hundred ways
the sun would lift itself
over the ridge.

Rebecca Cook, Upon Returning to the Father’s House

I have two pieces of poetry news to share, both involving poems finding their way back into the world.

First, my collection Rotura is included in Black Lawrence Press’s Sealey Challenge sale. Thirty-one full-length poetry collections are currently available for $12 each through the Black Lawrence Press sale page.

Published in 2022, Rotura moves through questions of family, longing, language, borders, and the different forms rupture can take within a life. For anyone curious about the book, three poems from the collection (“Certain Rivers,” “Conditioning (City Study),” and “Four Dirges”) can be read together at Poetry Is Currency.

*

I’m also glad to share the publication of Summer, Still, a new anthology from Lily Poetry Review featuring poetry and prose by faculty and alumni of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA Program. The anthology celebrates the program’s twentieth anniversary and the community of writers that has gathered around it over the years.

My poem “Night Matter” is included in the anthology. The poem considers writing as an act of persistence: what it means to continue making words when light is scarce and the night around us feels both material and immense. It first appeared as part of my January 2018 feature at A Dozen Nothing, where you can read “Night Matter” online.

There is something meaningful to me about these two announcements arriving together. One points back toward a collection and the poems gathered within it; the other allows an earlier poem to enter a new gathering, this time alongside the work of writers connected through Solstice.

I’m grateful for both occasions, for the continued life of these poems, and for anyone who spends time with them.

José Angel Araguz, Two Poetry Notes: Rotura and Summer, Still

I am not a summer girl—I haven’t been sleeping well with the heat (up to 95 degrees this week) and the wildfire smoke that lingered a few days—and lack of sleep has taken a toll on my brain and body. Maybe I’ve felt a little depression and anxiety, more than usual.

I had some good poetry news this week (which I can’t share yet) and also some book rejections from places that had made it a finalist the last time they saw the same manuscript which makes me worry I shouldn’t send it out anymore (when is it time to shelve something? I’ve been messing with this MS for over five years!)

I find myself looking forward to fall already—cooler temperatures, pumpkin and apples, the sunsets happening a little earlier, the light a little more golden. My mood feels more stable in fall and my productivity as a writer definitely goes up. Is this true for you as well? I am wishing you all good sleep and no anxiety in this world that continually seems to ratchet up—at least in America—reasons to have so much anxiety.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Safety in Seattle, Is it Fall Yet, Lack of Sleep, and Poetry Ups and Downs

The natural world always strikes a note of wonder in me, whether it is the sight of a polar bear ambling across the pack ice or the expressive face of a walrus. Or the universe of lichens and tiny flowers on the tundra. Or the chevrons of feathers on the back of an eagle.

Perhaps this is why I rely too much on the natural world for the imagery in my poems. It is all around me, such a rich and never-ending catalog of weirdness and beauty. So I forget that there are other ways to make meaning, so many other options in the world to feed my poems. Machines, small and large. Music. Films. Pop culture, in general. Science. Medicine. Everyday objects. Abstractions. Speculations. Conversations. (The list could go on, but you get the idea.)

Maybe this is also why I don’t often write about my travel experiences, though peple always say, “Oh, I’ll bet you’re going to write a lot of poems about this!” First, capturing the wonder feels like an insurmountable task. But also, I realize that it could seem like I am flaunting experiences I know I am privileged and lucky to have. (I even second-guessed writing about them in this post…). So I’ve tried to turn my wonder onto things I have not experienced.

To that point, a few things I have researched lately in the service of a draft:

• the vastness of space /features of the planets/elements of black holes
• the Marianas Trench
• the whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean
• how a television works (I honestly still think magic is the easiest answer)

I am trying to broaden my internal horizons, fill up my image bank. Not to shut out the natural world, but to have a different mirror to hold beside it, to juxtapose other pieces of life with it to make the page come alive.

Some collections I’ve read that do this well:

Soft Science and The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On by Frannie Choi

Karaoke at the End of World by Genevieve DeGuzman (Jackleg Press)

Who Will Cradle Your Head? by Jared Beloff (ELJ Editions)

Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell (Texas Review Press)

Yeet! by jason b crawford (Omnidawn/University of Chicago Press)

These collections all imagine worlds where nature is in concert with so many other things—cryptids, robots, apocalypse, hell and religion, Afro-futurism. They are ambitious and collections that have been teaching me some things about leaning into any and all of the world available to me, real or imagined. 

Donna Vorreyer, Hello, It’s Me…

I floated on my back,
the pool water muffling
all their hells.
I breathed in a forest
and it dried in my hair.

Instead of sun,
I saw mosaic.
Instead of
the machinery
of clouds,
smoke.

Sarah Lada, Smoke Screen

I went to a residential course at Ty Newydd many years ago and it changed my life. The kindness of the tutors – not the kindness that puffs you up and says you are a genius, but the kindness of someone telling you to keep on writing, that what you are doing matters. And it was the setting with the library and the strange acoustic that makes it feel sometimes as if someone is whispering in your ear, and the garden that stretches down to the sea, and the beautiful food. And for me it was the people on the course that I met as well – poets I’m still friends with all these years later.

Every time I teach a residential course and I arrive and meet the participants for the first time, I remember what I felt like. How much it meant to me – how I’d nearly turned my car round and driven home because I was so anxious. How I paid monthly to spread the cost – what a big deal it was for me financially to commit to it. I hope I never forget those things and I always try and bring as much energy and commitment to the teaching as the poets we work with have brought. It’s hard to carve a week out of your life to come and write poetry – harder for some more than others.

The group we worked with this week were wonderful – apparently all of them knew at least one other person in the group so the first night there was little awkwardness – they started chatting without Clare or I having to do anything! They were hugely supportive of each other throughout the week which was really lovely to see.

On Thursday I went for an illegal run – illegal as I’m not really meant to be running at the moment, because of my still dodgy ankle. But I REALLY needed to clear my head and it was so worth it – I found a really beautiful loop through the woods and having left Clare with the energy of Eyore I came back like Tigger, full of bounce again.

Clare and I were our usual quarrelsome selves – here we are on the final night of the course – when we were treated to a reading from everyone of the new work they’d been writing and working on during the week – an evening that was as good as any poetry reading I’ve paid money to see – which indicates the quality of the writers we were working with!

Kim Moore, A week at Moniack Mhor

As we crest the midpoint of summer submissions entering the inbox in consideration for next years series of books, I’ve been thinking a little again about what makes a book stand out in the queue and what gets passed on to the second read pile. I’ve already accepted a handful of things for August into September, and pickings are beautifully lush. I typically have three piles when sorting–the absolute yes, the maybes, and the no-thanks. The last pile is the easiest to send responses immediately. The others I tend to hold onto for a minute as I evaluate how much room I have in the schedule. This year, I do have a little more room (not making the books by hand is more expensive, but does free up time I normally would have spend folding, stapling, and trimming. While I still do all these things for pre-April 2026 titles, everything since is a matter of placing an order in just a few minutes, making the hard part the layout and design instead of the assembly, which can take a little longer with more complicated layouts, but not always. We’ve also been able to open subs up to longer projects and full-length manuscripts. This is especially welcome since many of our chaps before perfect-binding were running about 40 pages and weren’t always easy to trim. 

This spring, I fleshed out a little more guidance on what we’re looking for, including a broad definition of what is “poetry” which can mean prose, essays, vispo, plays, and any variety of hybrid works that tongue the edges of other genres. I love the unclassifiable books most. I also have my biases in terms of loving horror and gothic projects, so we readily welcome those in particular, but tend to choose a wide selection of styles and topics overall. 

But beyond these, one of the chief important things I am looking for is cohesion. Whether its a 100 page book or under 20 pages, tightness in subject matter or theme will always stand out, as will projects that have a narrative spine. So many times when encountering book manuscripts, it feels like a poet just threw everything in with the kitchen sink. But having things that tie and bind and link individual poems and parts together is important. Some intention in which poems are included and how they are arranged.  This is especially true of full-length books, especially first books, which usually tend to assemble from many disparate pieces, even if the poet eventually writes more project-related books down the line. There are a few ways, however, to bring disparate pieces together to make a sound chapbook or book of poems. 

Kristy Bowen, what I look for as an editor, part #1

I want extravagance.
Peonies. A five-layer cake.
Drones making dragons
in the sky. Flamenco.
Percussion. Not a band,
a symphony throwing its joy
over the city. A herd
of wild horses. Something,
anything bright & unearned.

Sharon Brogan, Grace

None of this feels instinctual. When we panic, we want to follow our gut. But the non-profit starvation cycle is our own graveyard loop. We cannot just trust our guts; we have to build a strategy so that the work we do moves us in the right direction. We need effort that keeps us on a straight course. Working harder, pushing through the spiral, leads to burnout. What needs to happen—our current focus—is re-aligning the organization with our mission and building a more sustainable foundation.

A couple of days ago, I was talking with someone who thought nonprofit staff shouldn’t be paid much. Often, people who have never worked in community building think that staff can live on squash and passion alone. Those who live in large houses with good cars don’t always have the perspective to understand how we march through crisis, how we face our emergencies, what motivates us to keep flying.

We clowns, acrobats, and artists who build culture live on sand and rice, and find all sorts of destructive ways to pass the time. And together, we build and rebuild. Together, we walk through the fire.

May we find joy in all the destruction and fly well into the sunrise.

Kate Gale, The Graveyard Spiral: On Breaking the Cycle of Emergency

I am descended from smugglers.
I hold the darkness of tunnels inside me;
hushed voices, past midnight, alert my ears.
I am descended from strong-armed men,
the readers of the sea.

I am descended from those who roam.
I hold the restlessness of wild words […]

Sue Finch, HUMANNESS

生命線短き手もて薔薇を剪る　篠原広子

seimeisen mijikaki te mote bara o kiru

a short lifeline
on my palm
I cut roses
                                               Hiroko Shinohara

from Haiku Shiki (Haiku Four Seasons), August 2025 Issue, Tokyo Shiki Shuppan, Tokyo

Fay Aoyagi, Today’s Haiku (July 22, 2026)